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Born in Savannah in 1902, Ellen Miriam Hopkins was carefully reared by her grandmother in Bainbridge, Ga. She sang in a boys' choir, won prizes for recitation at the Goddard Seminary in Vermont, studied dancing in New York, persuaded her uncle, a pressagent named Dixie Hines, to get her into the Music Box Revue in 1921. An injured ankle stopped her dancing. In 1925, she made her dramatic debut in Puppets. Another obscure actor in the cast was Fredric March, who played the lead opposite Miriam Hopkins in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde seven years later when both had become famed cinema performers. Currently under contract to Samuel Goldwyn, with a three-months vacation clause, Cinemactress Hopkins flies to spend her spare time in New York, where she acts in a play when she finds one that suits her. Because she likes to live near the water, she last year bought a Sutton Place Manhattan House overlooking the East River, keeps it ready for occupancy at all times. She has a wire-haired fox terrier, an original Matisse, an adopted son named Michael, two divorced husbands. Her friends are socialites as well as cinema celebrities. One of them is Mrs. Joan Whitney Payson.
Becky Sharp, the fourth cinema version of Thackeray's masterpiece, which includes also such Hollywood celebrities as Alan Mowbray, Alison Skipworth, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Frances Dee, Elsie Ferguson, Billie Burke, William Faversham, gives Miriam Hopkins opportunities to appear as a mercenary graduate of a Victorian London school, an unscrupulously flirtatious bride, and finally a déclassée chanteuse in a Bath beer parlor. Backgrounds with the strong coloration and three-dimensional depth of fine paintings, costumes of pink and saffron, emphasize those qualities which have hitherto made her acting so much more satisfactory on the stage than on the screen.
The critics who saw the first preview were divided. As to its star, they were unanimous. If Becky Sharp is the success the Whitneys hope, Miriam Hopkins will be considerably responsible. Consequently, in addition to profiting from whatever chaos it may cause in Hollywood, she will, like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, have been to some extent its cause.
Sequels. For its distributors to bring Pioneer a profit on Becky Sharp, RKO will have to induce the U. S. public to spend more than $2,000,000 on the picture. At Belmont Park, where he was busy watching the races last week, Producer Jock Whitney was not particularly excited about whether RKO did so. Even if Becky Sharp fails to make production costs, the Whitneys still have their shrewd 15% of Technicolor, Inc., which Becky Sharp is sure to boom. To make sure the boom continues, the strange Whitney cinema company has eight more films in Technicolor scheduled for release, of which the next will probably contain songs and dances.