Dressler

My descent began as I watched “Dinner at Eight,” a 1933 classic featuring several early MGM luminaries, including Marie Dressler, a stout actor in her early 60s whose impeccable timing and weary resilience had made her the biggest star in Hollywood.

Wanting to know more about Dressler, I opened my laptop and down the hole I went.

I learned that Dressler’s success had come after decades of triumph and travail.

By 1927 she was nearly broke and considering a housekeeping job when a dear friend, the celebrated screenwriter Frances Marion, offered Dressler a lead role in her next picture: “The Callahans and the Murphys,” a silent comedy so controversial, I read, that it was yanked from circulation and is now considered lost.

In an email, Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories, who was not part of Dr. Pandya’s work, characterized the result as “important — I do think it is important — extremely important, if it is true.”