Elsie Ames

Elsie Ames (May 18, 1902 – May 3, 1983) was an American comic dancer and film actress. Between 1937 and 1974 she acted in 15 films. She is best known as the female film partner of Buster Keaton.[1]

Elsie Ames
BornMay 18, 1902
New Jersey, United States
DiedMay 3, 1983
Northridge, Los Angeles, California, United States
OccupationActress

Ames was half of the vaudeville team Ames and Arno, doing a slapstick adagio routine. Theirs was a good, standard vaudeville act, as Variety reported in 1938: "Elsie Ames and Nick Arno make every second of their knockabout routine count for laughs. Nothing seems left to chance. Also, a mid-center walloper is the encore."[2] Ames and Arno performed their act on film in the Bing Crosby musical Double or Nothing (1937).

Elsie Ames's willingness to take pratfalls and physical punishment in the name of comedy made her a natural candidate for Columbia Pictures' short subjects. Producer Jules White had a host of male physical comedians under contract, but no female comics who could withstand the films' high slapstick content. In 1940 White hired Ames, who stood a little over five feet tall, as a foil for 5' 5" Buster Keaton. She worked with Keaton in five of his 10 Columbia shorts, and received featured billing. After the final short in the series, She's Oil Mine, Keaton let his Columbia contract lapse, leaving Ames idle. White tried to keep her Columbia career going, co-starring her with Harry Langdon (in two shorts) and then El Brendel (in one final short). She left Columbia in 1942.

She made two further movies, both with Nick Arno, doing their dance specialty.

Personal

Elsie Ames's daughter, Elizabeth Deering, is also an actress. Elizabeth "Betty Lou" Deering was married 1964–1983 to Seymour Cassel. Ames and her then son-in-law acted together in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971). Ames and Deering acted in A Woman Under the Influence (1974).

Filmography

References
  1. King, Rob (2017). Hokum!: The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture. University of California Press. p. 171. ISBN 9780520288119. Retrieved October 23, 2017 – via Google Books.
  2. Variety, Nov. 2, 1938, p. 52.
  3. Neibaur, James (2010). The Fall of Buster Keaton: His Films for MGM, Educational Pictures, and Columbia. Scarecrow Press. p. 159. ISBN 9780810876835. Retrieved October 23, 2017 – via Google Books.
  4. Okuda, Ted; Watz, Edward (2013). The Columbia Comedy Shorts: Two-Reel Hollywood Film Comedies, 1933–1958. McFarland & Company. ISBN 9781476610108. Retrieved October 23, 2017 – via Google Books.
  5. Batista Da Silva, George (2010). Os Filmes De Buster Keaton (in Portuguese). Joinville, Brazil: Clube de Autores. p. 71 – via Google Books. Spook Speaks, The - Curta-metragem produzido e dirigido por Jules White pelos estúdios da Columbia Pictures Corporation no ano de 1940. A história leva as letras de Ewart Adamson, Clyde Bruckman e Elwood Ullman. Com Buster Keaton, Elsie Ames, Don Beddoe, Dorothy Appleby, Lynton Brent, John Tyrrell, Bruce Bennett e Evelyn Young.
  6. Erickson, Hall (2012). Military Comedy Films: A Critical Survey and Filmography of Hollywood Releases Since 1918. McFarland & Company. p. 51. ISBN 9780786462902. Retrieved October 23, 2017 – via Google Books.
  7. Canby, Vincent (December 23, 1971). "Movie Review: Film by Cassavetes Takes Friendly Jabs". The New York Times. Retrieved October 23, 2017. "Minnie and Moskowitz," John Cassavetes's sixth and, in many ways, most ambitious film, is also his friendliest, in the dish-throwing, door-pounding, exclamation-pointed manner of a comic strip. [...] Florence ..... Elsie Ames
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