Kathlyn Williams - Infinite Women

This biography, written by Mark Garrett Cooper, is republished from the Women Film Pioneers Project with permission.
Citation: Cooper, Mark Garrett. “Kathlyn Williams.” In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013.

Born: 31 May 1888, United States
Died: 24 September 1960
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Kathleen Williams

Kathlyn Williams began work in motion pictures as an actress with Biograph in New York. “I was playing in stock,” she recounted to Photoplay in 1917. “One week when I was not working someone called me up from the Biograph studio and asked if I would work two days for them. I was dreadfully insulted at first, but I went out of curiosity expecting to be offered about fifty cents a day.” To her amazement, D. W. Griffith paid her ten dollars for each day’s work (77). Williams told Photoplay that she performed in three Biograph titles, but in combination, Paul Spehr and the American Film Institute catalog credit her with a total of five, with release dates beginning in 1909. Sources agree that she joined the Selig Polyscope Company in 1910 and quickly became the company’s leading actress. From the start, she played an action heroine, although she was also featured in dramatic roles. In 1913-14 she starred in the Adventures of Kathlyn, generally regarded as the first serial with “hold-over” suspense. While with Selig, she wrote scenarios for at least five titles, one of which, The Leopard’s Foundling (1914), written by Maibelle Heikes Justice, the Selig release notes credit her with directing. In 1916 she began her second marriage, to Charles Eyton, described in most biographies as a Paramount executive, but likely general manager of the Oliver Morosco Photoplay Company, which released through distributor Paramount at the time. Wiliams appeared in a series of Morosco pictures. In 1917, Julia Crawford Ivers produced her scenario for Lost in Transit at Pallas Pictures, also releasing through Paramount and, like Morosco, soon to be absorbed in Famous Players-Lasky-Paramount. Lost in Transit is Williams’s last known screenwriting credit. In 1919, Moving Picture World reported that she would organize her own company, but probably the company never materialized (359). Williams worked steadily as a performer through 1935, when she retired from the screen with well over one hundred titles to her name. Although several titles in which Williams acted survive, there are no known prints of the titles she either wrote or directed.
The relationship between Williams’s star persona and her roles as screenwriter and director poses an interesting, and not atypical, problem. As with many other early women filmmakers, her success in front of the camera created opportunities behind it, but her reputation as a performer may well have limited those opportunities as well. Known especially for her work with the big cats in Selig’s zoo, Williams exemplifies the “nervy movie lady” described by Jennifer Bean. Unlike her action-hero counterparts, Bean argues, this figure was represented as “nonknowledgeable and unknowabable” (14). Her hallmark was the ability to confront extreme bodily dangers with a childlike lack of concern—not, one would think, a quality prized in a director. A 1915 item in Selig’s in-house paper, The Paste-Pot and Shears, suggests the blithe unconcern Bean finds typical: asked to account for her success in working with wild animals, “‘I just act with them’ was the answer of the blonde and enticing Kathlyn.” Three titles Selig credited her with writing and (in the one case) directing in 1914 and 1915 each drew on this devil-may-care persona: The Leopard’s Foundling (1914), The Strange Case of Talmai Lind (1915), and A Sultana of the Desert (1915).
According to Harold McGrath’s illustrated novelization, The Adventures of Kathlyn is set in the mythical Indian kingdom of Allaha. The serial’s thirteen episodes chronicle Kathlyn’s perilous encounters with wild beasts and agents of the insidious Council of Three as she strives to rescue her explorer father and free the enslaved population. She finds help from a white hunter and native servants she befriends. The Leopard’s Foundling (1914), the first of three films, and the one written and directed by Williams, moves its action to Africa and makes its heroine a wild child lost to her human parents, raised by leopards, and redeemed to civilization by an American hunter. Moving Picture World in November 1913 described the then-unreleased film as “a new note in dramatic daring in dealing with the oarnivora [sic] as though the treacherous big cats were the most tractable and gentle of animals” (1017). The Strange Case of Talmai Lind (1915) returns to a mythical beast-filled India to tell the tale of Talmai, who dies tragically saving the white man she loves, and the final film, A Sultana of the Desert (1915), features Williams as Jean, the daughter of a French exporter who objects to her romance with Christoph and banishes her to the convent. Christoph chases her across the desert, and in the complications that follow Jean befriends a lion subsequently killed by her father. Although detailed analysis is impossible in the absence of surviving prints, it seems clear enough that, as in Adventures of Kathlyn, these films feature stereotypically exotic settings, adventure plots, big cats, great white hunter figures, native friends, and absent, wicked, or otherwise inadequate fathers.
As with Cleo Madison and Grace Cunard, two other serial queens who also wrote and directed the films in which they appeared, press coverage of Williams emphasized her femininity along with her daring. For instance, in 1914 the Los Angeles Times reported that for The Lady or the Tigers, “Miss Williams was required to enter the cage of three tigers lately brought from the jungle, which were untamed and didn’t know a moving-picture genius from a meat-pie,” and in the next breath that “Miss Williams has five new Paris gowns for use in The Rosary and The Ne’er Do-Well (4). In addition to uniting the daredevil and the fashionable lady in a single body, this story also implicitly parses those roles into two different genres.
In fact, Williams’s first credited screenplays were modern dramas with fairly conventional romance plots. The Last Dance (1912) relates the tragic story of a nightclub dancer who retreats to the country to recuperate from heart trouble. She falls in love with the local minister, who nurses her back to health but ultimately spurns her because of what he regards as her disreputable past. To prove the virtue of her dancing, she performs for him and wins him over, but her heart condition finally kills her. Williams did not appear in The Last Dance, but she plays the lead in The Young Mrs. Eames (1913). Here, a young widow rejects an ardent younger suitor after she overhears him declaring his love for her daughter. She marries a man closer to her age. After leaving Selig to work at Paramount under the direction of William Desmond Taylor, Cecil B. DeMille, and others, Williams’s films continued more in this dramatic vein. Her screenplay for Lost in Transit (1917) follows an infant boy kidnapped first from his wealthy father and then from an Italian junk man who cares for him.
In April 1917, a story in the Los Angeles Times reported that Williams “has had more than a dozen of her photoplays produced and two of them she directed herself.” It added, “Deep in her heart Miss Williams has always felt a great desire to devote all of her attention to directing, but she is too popular as an actress with the managers and the public to permit her to indulge her ambition” (18). The story leaves us with two puzzles. First, there is a discrepancy between the number of titles it attributes to Williams and known credits. Second, one might well wonder how studio producers understood her popularity and how that understanding did and did not translate into opportunities to write and direct.