Mabel Ethelreid Normand was born in 1892 in Staten Island, New York. She did some modeling but no stage acting, and her so-called naturalistic film performances differentiated her from veteran Broadway scene-chewers. The American Film Institute notes Normand’s “doe-eyed beauty, innocent playfulness, and gamin-like charisma.” Turner Classic Movies calls her “rambunctious and non-conformist while exuding an ineffable charm and gentleness on screen.” Encyclopedia Britannica weighs in that Normand “pioneered a new type of comic character: a pretty girl who could take a pratfall.”
Throughout the 1910s, Normand was a seemingly ubiquitous presence. Following her minor 1910 debut, Columbia University research found that Normand starred in at least 167 shorts and 23 features.
As a comedic actor and director, Normand was a peer, partner, and foil to Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Normand acted in Bangville Police (1913), often considered the first Keystone Kops film. She directed Mabel's Strange Predicament (1914), where Chaplin introduced his Little Tramp character. And she was again a title character in the classic, Arbuckle-helmed, Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916).
More comedy lore: Normand may have been the first “damsel in distress” tied to railroad tracks, in Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life (1913). She may even have invented—and certainly popularized—the classic slapstick “pie in the face” bit. In 1915, Variety readers named Normand their favorite female comedian. In 1918, Mickey, a drama that she produced and starred in was the country’s top-grossing feature film.
Mickey would turn out to be the only film Normand produced at her own, eponymous Los Angeles silent film studio, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Co. For a brief period, Normand’s name was spelled out in large letters across two different sides of its main building. Then, just like that, the signs were gone. Same as Normand’s incandescent stardom, and her too-short life.
The building in question––a two-story, airy, greenhouse-like structure––was, in 1916–1917, the centerpiece of the four-acre studio. An adjacent barn held ten dressing rooms, offices, and departments. The entire operation was wedged onto a triangular plot of land between Fountain and Bates Avenues and Effie Street in LA’s Edendale neighborhood—now known as Silver Lake—that was an early film industry epicenter.
By the time the decade turned, the lot had been purchased by Thomas Ince and turned into the William S. Hart Studio, where the auteur shot interiors for his popular Westerns. Over the years, various scene-painting operations used the space. Today, the site has returned to its roots as a rental stage called Mack Sennett Studios. (The real-life Mack Sennett was a collaborator—and more—of Normand, but he didn’t have his own studio here).
A noticeable feature graces the building’s exterior: the mural “American Dreamers” by artists Shepard Fairey and Vhils. The current owners named an event space for Normand—a nice nod, but a far cry from a century or so prior when the whole location was hers.
For Mabel Normand, the 1920s proved her downfall. She stayed active in the industry through 1927, though stories abound of substance abuse and her proximity to multiple deadly scandals and tragedies. In 1928 Normand was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Two years later, she passed away at a sanitarium in Monrovia, CA.