page_title: Mabel Normand
section_title: Early life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Mabel Normand / Early life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Actress Mabel Normand
context_page_description: Amabel Ethelreid Normand was an American silent-film actress, screenwriter, director, and producer. She was a popular star and collaborator of Mack Sennett in his Keystone Studios films, and at the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s had her own movie studio and production company. Onscreen, she appeared in 12 successful films with Charlie Chaplin and 17 with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, sometimes writing and directing movies featuring Chaplin as her leading man.
  Throughout the 1920s, her name was linked with widely publicized scandals, including the 1922 murder of William Desmond Taylor and the 1924 shooting of Courtland S. Dines, who was shot by Normand's chauffeur using her pistol. She was a suspect in the first crime for a short period, but disregarded from the latter. Her film career declined, and she suffered a recurrence of tuberculosis in 1923, which led to a decline in her health, retirement from films, and her death in 1930 at age 37.
context_section_description: Born Amabel Ethelreid Normand in New Brighton, Richmond County, New York (before it was incorporated into New York City), she grew up in a working-class family. Her mother, Mary "Minne" Drury, of Providence, Rhode Island, was of Irish heritage, while her father was French Canadian. Her father, Clodman "Claude" Normand, was employed as a cabinetmaker and stage carpenter at Sailors' Snug Harbor home for elderly seamen. She had 5 siblings.
  Before she entered films at age 16 in 1909, Normand worked as an artist's model, which included posing for postcards illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl image, as well as for Butterick's clothing pattern manufacturers in lower Manhattan.
  For a short time, she worked for Vitagraph Studios in New York City for $25 per week, but Vitagraph founder Albert E. Smith admitted she was one of several actresses about whom he made a mistake in estimating their "potential for future stardom."
  Her lead performance, directed by D. W. Griffith in the dramatic 1911 short film Her Awakening, drew attention and she met director Mack Sennett while at Griffith's Biograph Company. She embarked on a topsy-turvy relationship with him; he later brought her across to California when he founded Keystone Studios in 1912. Her earlier Keystone films portrayed her as a bathing beauty, but Normand quickly demonstrated a flair for comedy and became a major star of Sennett's short films.
  Normand appeared with Charles Chaplin and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in many short films. She is credited as being the first film star to receive a pie thrown in the face.
  She played a key role in starting Chaplin's film career and acted as his leading lady and mentor in a string of films in 1914, sometimes co-writing and directing or co-directing films with him. Chaplin had considerable initial difficulty adjusting to the demands of film acting, and his performance suffered for it. After his first film appearance in Making a Living, Sennett felt he had made a costly mistake.
  Most historians agree  Normand persuaded Sennett to give Chaplin another chance, and she and Chaplin appeared together in a dozen subsequent films, almost always as a couple in the lead roles. In 1914, she starred with Marie Dressler and Chaplin in Tillie's Punctured Romance, the first feature-length comedy. Earlier that same year, in January/February, Chaplin first played his Tramp character in Mabel's Strange Predicament, although it wound up being the second Tramp film released; Chaplin offered a detailed account of his experience on the film in his autobiography. Normand directed Chaplin and herself in the film.
  She opened her own company in partnership with Mack Sennett 1916. It was based in Culver City and was a subsidiary of the Triangle Film Corporation. She lost the company in 1918 when Triangle experienced a massive shake up which also had Sennett lose Keystone and establish his own independent studio. In 1918, as her relationship with Sennett came to an end, Normand signed a $3,500-per-week contract with Samuel Goldwyn. Around that same time, Normand allegedly had a miscarriage with Goldwyn's child.
caption: Who's Who in the Film World, 1914
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