The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-04-18
OllS SKINNER WICKED ORIENTAL HERO OF
 "KISMET' CHARMING MAN "OFF THE STAGE"
By DOLLY DALRYMPLH

Like a figure of our fancy
 Like some strange exotic dream,
 We see your fiendish villain
 Portrayed in wild and wondrou.
 schemes;
 Yes, it's "Hajj'-the King of Romance.
 With that Eastern passion in his heal But it's YOU yourself that brings him l to us
 With all the richness of your art!
 Much of the oriental vigor of "Hajj, the willy hero of MT Knoblauch's Che should have been named Haroun-al- Ras- chid) play "Kismet' was missing yester- day afternoon. when MT. Otis Skinner, America's leading romantic actor, chatted l With me in the palm room at the Hotel Hilmann shortly after his arrival. 1 Instead
 As he expressed It. a very tired and much worn out and 'grouchy" gentleman 1 (although l failed to agree with him on the last point met me and in the most cordial and charming manner submitted to be questioned concerning various topics pertaining to orientalism and the stage
 MT. Skinner is even more fascinating off the stage than "on," and that Is | sayiilS a great deal ] Unaffected by all of his tremendous success, and being a "matinee idoI' of whom the public never tires. the man with 1 the strong, well-knit figure, in the fash- ionable brown suit, the powerful, intel ligent face that might belong to a man in any successful walk of life, but for the tender brown eyes that hold all tine sweetness of feminine eyes and always the vision of the dreamer, framed in hair now black, now slvered, and closely cut to keep the tell tale curls from being refraetorily obvious, with none of the swagser of the wckedest of stage vl- lains, the strut of Lafayette Tower. nor yet the terrifying stride of Brideau--this and you have a pen picture" of MT. Skinner as I saw him yesterday
 promised to be brief, but 1t was diff cult, seeing plainly after moments cnat with him how really interesting and de- lightful a subject he was, for with every question l propounded he had way of getting rid of 1t sometimes with the cruel indifference with which Hajj strangles his victims in "Kismet," but oftener with an intimacy and closeness that made nm truly charming.
 When l suggested that 1t must have taken time and eternity thrown in for him to have gotten the atmosphere of the oriental romance that he Is play ing, Mir Skinner veered round and knocked my idol of clay smack down in the mud by declaring that he'd never been a great student at all
 Ah-hem!
 Now, then,
 Yes-even more.
 MT. Skinner announced that he was even lazy!
 My word.
 And
 Now
 Although Mir Skinner said this and MT. Skinner knows and MT. Skinner is tleman never lies
 Still
 l take issue with him.
 man who has mastered every phase of emotion from the marvellous tech ntque of Frances de Rimi, even to the oriental gesture, expression and make up of the most cruel of the Arabian Nights heros must be, not only a great student but an erudite scholar.
 My only inception of orientalism,, said MT. Skinner presently, has been my imagination. True, I have read Sir Richard Burton a great deal, his pill grmage to Mecca and also the English diplomat Morier in his Persian dis sertation, '1aji Baba of Ispahan, as well some of the works of Lane on oriental subjects and with the aid or my own knowledge derived from my earliest recollections of the Arabian Nights I have evolved the character of Hail"
 And you didn't live among the orientals% I asked, 'and study them at close ranger
 "At Gibraltar" MT. Skinner answered "my plotting paper took up some of their ink A shiek and his four wives from across the Moorish border,