She had a pretty good claim on the Peter Pan routine:
At seventeen, she was interviewed by J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. Although the role had been sought by such established actresses as Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford, Barrie personally chose Bronson to play the lead in the film adaptation of his work, which was released in 1924.
Note how the bio begins: "Betty's mother chaperones all her screen kisses."
Said one swain at the time:
"Another important picture had just started. It was Peter Pan, directed by a clever caricature of a wildly temperamental movie director, Herbert Brenon. After exhaustive tests, Betty Bronson, a pretty and gifted girl in her middle teens, was given this famous role... I fell for Betty! It was my first intensely juvenile, deep-sighs-and-bad-sonnets love. . . . I was so smitten with Betty, I could think of little else, except when I could call on her, even though her overprotective mother was always just in the next room."
So wrote Douglas Fairbanks Jr. You can see a scene from Peter Pan here - note the exceptional FX for Tinkerbell, large and small. |