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• W1527359988 abstract "Five decades after his death, little is known of the British-born actor Gaston Mervale, who in 1897 joined the Australasian 'Firm' of J. C. Williamson Ltd as a leading character actor. Until his professional retirement in 1938, though with various periods of working abroad, he maintained his presence in the Firm. By 1907, Mervale was 'no longer the saturnine personage beloved of matinee girls', who ten years previously had made his debut appearance with the Knight-Ferrar company.1 But long after what Hal Porter describes as 'the hysterical loyalty of this powerful and dangerous tribe' of gallery goddesses2 - typically more devoted to charming matinee idols than to skilful character actors - had fixated elsewhere, Mervale continued over many decades of his very long life to work not only in acting in drama and musical comedy, but also in directing for stage and film, and in forms of actor training.Mervale is one of the many touring actors in the heady early days of national cinema industries who moved between the Australian stage and film. As a performer, he excelled in those sinister, flamboyant and commanding figures who fascinated popular audiences by igniting the smouldering flames of the superhuman and the supernatural which ever lie dormant in our proclaimedly rationalised and mechanised civilisation. His was a cosmopolitan career as theatrical and cinematic actor and director in Australia and America. The diverse and prolonged contribution to twentiethcentury Australian and New Zealand performance by this specialist in 'heavy' roles sketches the fluidly cosmopolitan nature of early twentiethcentury artistic exchanges and professional activity.Being a habituated citizen of the global Anglosphere or an honorary member of the middle classes - and Mervale was both - were significant assets in transnational theatrical careers, where the actor had to be convincing in the same social space as his or her five audiences. His international theatrical experience gained Mervale employment by Australian and American cinematic producers. To actors of all lines of business, cinema offered both a supplementary source of work and - potentially - alternative careers in a new industry where they might play foundational roles as leaders and creators. The mute form's full-bodied gestural language, and its reliance on vivid character creation attained through costume and facial make-up, appealed particularly to the character actor: those versatile and selftransforming performers who supported the star. While in the earliest days of cinema, careers in film-making might be sustained in Australia or New Zealand, the small populations of these nations and the larger economic production forces of Hollywood eventually compromised this opportunity. For several decades from the 1920s, supremely talented regional personnel increasingly took ship for America or Britain. But Mervale, whose own American work was completed by the 1920s, was not one of these, and right into his ninth decade he worked in Australian and New Zealand professional and amateur theatre.The 'saturnine personage'Though a native of Devon, Mervale is one of great cosmopolites of the Australasian theatre. Over his dramatic career, he performed with such stars as the French Gabrielle Rejane, the Americans Nance O'Neil, Mrs Leslie Carter, Blanche Bates and Minnie Tittell Brune, and me Australian-based romantic star Julius Knight. His professional background commenced in British theatrical touring and developed partly outside it. From his family, he inherited musical and language gifts and a wide European culture. Both his French-born mother and his younger brother Alfred were music teachers, and Mervale's own defining Australasian role was appropriately Svengali, literature's most famous and sinister music teacher.Svengali was born from the fin-de-siecle fascination with the hypnotic and occult, with its simultaneous fear and identification with malevolent masculine outsiders who, like Bram Stoker's Dracula or Gaston Leroux's Erik (the Phantom of the Opera), threaten the European heartlands, and pose particularly nervous threats by seeking to dominate its women by means of sinister psychological or supernatural powers. …" @default.
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• W1527359988 date "2011-04-01" @default.
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• W1527359988 title "Australia's Svengali: Gaston Mervale in Theatre and Film" @default.
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