The 1952 Photoplay Scholarship Contest

Proudly, Photoplay announces a second search for undiscovered talent. The prize again will be a two-year scholarship complete with tuition, room, board, allowance, books and transportation to the Pasadena Playhouse—the college which offers its students the most intensive, the most thorough training of any dramatic school anywhere.

This, the second Photoplay Scholarship Contest, begins in the spotlight of the first search, only recently concluded. Virginia McGuire, 1951 winner from Bridgeport, Conn., is now settled at the Playhouse, learning how to turn natural ability into finished performance. Runners-up Rachelle Mendlovitz of New Braunfels, Texas, and Joyce McLeod of Providence, Rhode Island, also share the spotlight At the end of their momentous trip to California, made at the invitation of Photoplay, they were interviewed by the casting directors of major studios, won themselves screen tests and possible screen careers.

If you want to be an actress, if grease paint and footlights, first-night audiences and rising curtains fill your dreams, then this is your opportunity. Whether you live in a tiny township or a great metropolis, the Photoplay Scholarship Contest can find you through your applications, letters, voice recordings and pictures. And if, through these things, your talent becomes evident, you will be invited to one of the auditions held in sixty or more cities across the nation, at which the judges will be directors from the local radio station, producers from the community theatre, drama critics from the local newspaper, instructors from near-by schools.

“Placing” at the auditions puts you in the running for the California finals. And though only three girls are invited to the finals, winning the local audition can be a springboard for furthering your career. Photoplay notes with pride the Honorable Award winners who found recognition at these auditions.

Betty Britz, a North Carolina girl in Los Angeles for the preliminaries, was later contacted by a Pasadena Playhouse scout for a possible part in one of their Community Theatre Productions. Noel Marie Mast so impressed the Chicago board, she was auditioned at the NBC talent bureau, is being considered for a spot with a local show at the end of the school year. Nita Winslow was recommended by New York audition board judge,actress Judith Evelyn, to the casting director of CBS. And Eastern representatives of Twentieth Century- Fox, who saw Wisconsin’s Nancy Fowlkes, New York’s Ruth Hartley and Indiana’s Neva Reece, invited them back for interviews, now have a watchful eye on their progress. Other Honorable Award winners whose talent Photoplay believes someday will be recognized are: Jo Anne Henderson of Kansas City, Missouri; Martha Morrison of Detroit, Michigan; Marjorie Margot Schmitz of Cleveland, Ohio; Petrina Susanne Williams of Hackensack, N. J.

If you are one of those chosen as a finalist, you become a celebrity overnight. You are interviewed by the newspapers. Your picture is on the front page. Photoplay writes a story about you. And you go off to California for the finals. There, whether or not you are the winner, you meet the press, the casting directors of the Hollywood studios, producers and stars. You make guest appearances on radio, on TV programs broadcast coast-to-coast.

If you want to study at the Pasadena Playhouse, if more than anything in the world you want to be an actress, enroll in the Photoplay Scholarship Contest. You need never have acted before an audience. You need not be beautiful. You need only talent and the desire to succeed.

Watch for the February Photoplay for further details.

 

It is a quote. PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE JANUARY 1952