Daphne Pollard

Diminutive stage star

Born Daphne Trott, in the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, to Walter William Trott and Annie nee Daniels, she joined the Pollard Lilliputian Opera Company at the age of six, having been taken to rehearsals by her older sister, Ivy, who was also a performer. The Pollard company featured performers whose ages ranged from six to sixteen years, playing light opera, operetta and musical comedy (LeCoq, Offenbach, etc.). They toured Australia, New Zealand and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were well received and highly acclaimed.

Like many of its performers, Daphne Trott took her stage name from the Pollard company. In later years she claimed she was related to the "cricketing Trotts," presumably meaning famous Australian cricketers Albert Trott and Harry Trott

Career in the US & UK

Daphne Pollard first arrived in Los Angeles during a company tour in September 1901 and was singled out in enthusiastic reviews. In a November 1903 review, the Los Angeles Herald reported that "Daphne has charm. A full contralto speaking voice, a fine mimicy and good health are her ordinary stock in trade possessions; her delightful small personality is the crown, and makes her every inch a little queen of comic opera." Following further tours of Australia, the company was again in North America from late 1905. By 1907 Pollard was confident and popular enough to strike out on her own. Her Broadway debut was in Eddie Foy's Mr Hamlet of Broadway in 1908. She appeared soon after in The Bohemian Girl at the Los Angeles Theater, at $60 per show. The Los Angeles Times reported that because she was small and not well-developed for her age, Humane Officers thought she was no more than seven. She convinced them that she was actually sixteen.

In October 1908, Pollard appeared with a New York company that performed musical and dramatic shows such as The Thief, The Chorus Lady, The Witching Hour, and Girls, among others. The productions were staged at the Grand Opera House. Among her fellow actors were Harry Macdonough and Charles Halton. Pollard appeared with the Ziegfeld Follies and in Winter Garden Theatre shows. In 1909, she was with a group which entertained at Keith and Proctor's Fifth Avenue Theater.

In 1914 Pollard was the petite star of The Girl Behind the Counter at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway (Manhattan). The production also featured actor Al Shean. She followed this success with performances in A Knight for a Day (1915) and The Passing Show of 1915. The latter play was staged at The Mason Theater in Los Angeles and also featured Marilyn Miller.

In 1917 Pollard was in London, where she appeared with English comedian and singer George Robey, playing the role of "She of the Tireless Tongue" in Albert de Courville, Dave Stamper and Gene Buck's lavishly-staged revue Zig-Zag!, which ran for 648 performances at the Hippodrome. She remained with the show when it moved to the Folies Bergère in Paris at the end of the year. She appeared in other successful productions at the Hippodrome, including Box o' Tricks (1918), Joy Bells (1919) and Jig-Saw! (1920). She returned to New York and performed in The Greenwich Village Follies in 1923-24.

Hollywood screen comedian

After a long career on stage and aged in her late thirties, Mack Sennett signed her with great fanfare in June 1927, describing her as an "internationally famous musical comedy and vaudeville star." She was cast in several "Sennett Girl Comedies," two-reel productions designed to show off the beauty of Sennett's latest actresses. Other actresses featured in the girl comedy shorts were Carole Lombard, Anita Barnes, and Kathryn Stanley. Her first title was The Girl from Everywhere, with Pollard receiving title billing. Some of these films included short, two-strip technicolor sequences. In these first movies for Sennett, Pollard demonstrated her talents as a comedian and dancer. Lombard and Pollard became close friends during the time they were working for Sennett. Lombard reportedly said "Daphne Pollard and I were just in hysterics the whole time. We used to pull the worst gags on...some of the boys."

Pollard went on to work for Vitaphone, RKO Pictures and Universal Pictures. She memorably appeared in several Laurel and Hardy films of the mid-1930s, as a shrewish wife of Oliver Hardy in Thicker than Water (1935) and Our Relations (1936) and also as a maid in Bonnie Scotland (1935), achieving almost 60 screen credits in the seven years between 1928 and 1935. She continued to appear in occasional supporting roles into the early 1940s, again appearing briefly with Laurel and Hardy in The Dancing Masters (1943). Her final role was as Mrs McGinnis in Kid Dynamite (1943).

Personal life

In July 1911 she married Ellington Strother Bunch, a journalist.

Pollard's parents and five of her siblings joined her in the US after 1911, settling in Seattle. An older sister, Hilda, who had married, stayed in Melbourne.

In early 1928, together with other former Pollard Lilliputan Opera Company members, she attended the Hollywood funeral of comedian Ted McNamara following his sudden death from pneumonia.

Daphne Pollard died in Los Angeles in 1978.