Evelyn Preer

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Evelyn Preer bigraphy, stories - Actress, singer

Evelyn Preer : biography

July 16, 1896 – November 27, 1932

Evelyn Preer, born Evelyn Jarvis (July 16, 1896 – November 27, 1932), was a pioneering African-American stage and screen actress and blues singer of the 1910s through the early 1930s. Evelyn was known within the black community as "The First Lady of the Screen."

She was the first black actress to earn celebrity and popularity. She appeared in ground-breaking films and stage productions, such as the first play by a black playwright to be produced on Broadway, and the first New York-style production with a black cast in California in 1928, in a revival of a play adapted from Somerset Maugham’s short story, Rain.

Evelyn Preer filmography

  • The Homesteader (1919)
  • Within Our Gates (1920)
  • The Brute (1920)
  • The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921)
  • Deceit (1923)
  • Birthright (1924)
  • The Devil’s Disciple (1926)
  • The Conjure Woman (1926)
  • The Spider’s Web (1926)
  • The Wedding March (1928) uncredited
  • The Framing of the Shrew (1928)
  • Melancholy Dame (1928)
  • Oft in the Silly Night (1928)
  • Georgia Rose (1930)
  • Ladies of the Big House (1931)
  • Blonde Venus (1932)

Career

Jarvis began her performance career in early vaudeville and minstrel shows. She changed her surname to Preer.

Her first film role was in Oscar Micheaux’s 1919 debut film The Homesteader, when she was 23. Micheaux promoted Preer as his leading actress with a steady tour of personal appearances and a publicity campaign. Her most well-known film role is in his Within Our Gates, (1920). It is the only known surviving Micheaux film to feature her, although she appeared in more of his works.

Micheaux was such an influential film director that he has been dubbed the "Father of Afro-American Cinema". Micheaux developed many of his subsequent films to showcase Preer’s extraordinary versatility. These included The Brute (1920), The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921), Deceit (1923), Birthright (1924), The Devil’s Disciple (1925), The Conjure Woman (1926) and The Spider’s Web (1926). These Micheaux titles are presumed lost. Preer was lauded by both the black and white press for her ability to continually succeed in ever more challenging roles. She was known for refusing to play roles that she believed demeaned African Americans.

Early life and education

Born Evelyn Jarvis in Vicksburg, Mississippi, she migrated with her mother to Chicago after her father died prematurely. She completed grammar and high school in the city.

Marriage and family

Preer met her husband Edward Thompson when they were both acting with the Lafayette Players in Chicago. They married in 1924 while in Nashville, Tennessee., Silent Era: Silent Era People,accessed 29 September 2011

In April 1932, Preer gave birth to her only child, daughter Edeve Thompson. Developing post-childbirth complications, Preer died of double pneumonia on November 27, 1932 in Los Angeles, at the age of 36.

Her husband, Edward Thompson, continued as a popular leading man and "heavy" in numerous race films throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He died in 1960. Their daughter entered Catholic holy orders and is known as Sister Francesca Thompson. She is an assistant dean at Fordham University, New York.

Stage career

In 1920, Evelyn Preer joined The Lafayette Players in Chicago. The theatrical stock company was founded in 1915 by Anita Bush, a pioneering stage and film actress known as “The Little Mother of Black Drama.” Bush and her acting troupe toured the US to bring legitimate theatre to black audiences, at a time when theatres were racially segregated by law in the South, and often by custom in the North.

By the mid-1920s, Evelyn Preer began garnering much attention from the white press and she began to appear in "crossover" films and stage parts. In 1923, she acted in the Ethiopian Art Theatre’s production of The Chip Woman’s Fortune by Willis Richardson. This was the first dramatic play by an African-American playwright to be produced on Broadway in New York City.