“From the minute I got news of Jeanne Eagels running about the shops in New York to get a pair
“From the minute I got news of Jeanne Eagels running about the shops in New York to get a pair of shoes for Miss Sadie Thompson I knew that the stage had something coming to it. She dressed the part from the ground up. No need of telling again the old story of her finding one shoe, the mate having been lost, and then having another made to match, except to give emphasis to the point I am making: Jeanne Eagels used her brains from the minute she read the manuscript of Rain. And then she went to work.“Just try to dress a part. It is easy enough to speculate about it and to even visualize it, but when you come to putting shoes, dress, stockings, hat, beads together, that’s another matter. The objective Sadie Thompson must be the subjective Sadie Thompson. There’s no separating them. Only an artist could do that. The work must be done from within out. And that’s the way Jeanne Eagels did it.” – Recollections of an anonymous stagehand on Jeanne Eagels’ legendary performance as Sadie Thompson in the original Broadway production of Rain, 1922 -- source link
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