By the time the Tower Picture House in Leeds opened its doors, people had been standing outside for hours. The queue along Briggate was two or three deep. Women in cloche hats stood with men in broad flat caps while children scampered in and out of their legs.
They had come to see a new film, The Heart of a Rose, which was billed as ‘a Yorkshire story’. The posters also promised something more: the film’s star, Stella Muir, was a ‘Leeds girl’.
A Yorkshire star
In fact, Stella had been born in Scarborough in September 1900. Her father was a grocer, and the family lived near the Castle, which Stella would remember being bombarded by German battleships. She later moved to Leeds to work in a clothing factory near York Street.
Someone told Stella she had a “film face”. Encouraged, she began looking for work as a film extra. In reality, she far exceeded those modest ambitions. When The Heart of a Rose was released in the summer of 1920, it saw her in a leading role.
She played the Rose of the title, an orphan adopted by an old ironmaster and who falls in love with his son. The film was shot in at the Vickers foundry in Sheffield and was met with a good deal of praise. The Yorkshire Post called it “thoroughly clean and wholesome,” while trade paper The Bioscope praised the “impressive” scenes of iron smelting.
Six thousand roses
Stella too was praised. The Bioscope described her as “a dainty star with a pretty face and an appealing personality”. Kinematograph Weekly hailed her as “the discovery of the season”, while the Daily Mirror predicted she “will be right in the front rank of the world’s film stars in the near future.” Many agreed she was ‘the English Mary Pickford’.
She attended the Leeds premier of The Heart of a Rose in person, which is why there were so many people standing in line. The screening took place on Monday 28 June 1920, when she was still three months short of her twentieth birthday. Stella drove up specially from her new home in London in her brand-new Sunbeam motor car.
The Tower Picture House, itself only a couple of months old, was part of the Grand Arcade and could seat more than a thousand people in something approaching luxury.
The management promised that Stella would present a fresh rose to every woman who came to see the film. In the end, she handed out six thousand of them. She also autographed six hundred photographs of herself.
Many of those who had waited so long to see her arrive also wanted to see her depart. There were still three thousand people outside the Tower when Stella emerged. She had to be hoisted above their heads and carried through the crowds to her car.
Fame – and a sudden fade
The reaction in Leeds was repeated elsewhere. Stella Muir’s photograph was suddenly appearing not only in newspapers, but also on birthday cards. She was said to be receiving a thousand fan letters a day, and she revealed that she had turned down offers from American film companies and even a proposal of marriage from a Middle Eastern prince. She also announced that she had formed her own film production company.
Yet if this was the high-point of her career, it proved short-lived.
Two more feature films followed in 1920 – one shot on location in Whitby and Robin Hood’s Bay, the other at the top of Blackpool Tower. But neither matched the success of The Heart of a Rose. Before long, Stella found herself sharing the screen with a hippopotamus named Nora.
The last of her films to be shown in Leeds arrived in April 1921. The Mediator, which Stella both produced and starred in, cast her in the roles of a mother and her daughter. It was shown at the Albert Hall – the large, circular lecture theatre in the Mechanics’ Institute (now the City Museum). The film is largely forgotten now and doesn’t appear under Stella’s name on either Wikipedia or IMDb.
From the silver screen to the variety stage
Although Stella went on visiting Leeds, it was never again in connection with a film. When she returned in the summer of 1931, it was to the City Varieties on Swan Street as part of a double act called the Musical Sylvesters. Her partner was Alfred Sylvester, whom she would soon marry. It was a lively act, in which the couple danced, swapped jokes and played the Hawaiian guitar. They also somehow managed to coax tunes out of handsaws, electric fans, and a xylophone made of bottles.
The Sylvesters returned to Leeds the following year, this time appearing at the Shaftesbury Cinema on Harehills Lane. The venue had opened four years earlier with Ronald Colman on screen and the Black Dyke Mills Band on stage. Its foyer was wood-panelled and the auditorium walls were decorated with countryside scenes.
A glimpse of what might have been
The Shaftesbury specialised in combining films – talkies by now – with variety acts. Stella and Alf performed between showings of a new film, Sally in our Alley, whose lead, Gracie Fields, was well on the way to becoming a huge star. She offered Stella a glimpse, perhaps, of how things might have been.
After their appearance at the Shaftesbury, the Sylvesters departed for a variety tour of South Africa, after which Stella Muir faded from public view. She and Alfred were still together in the 1950s, when he was still touring the halls. But her days in the limelight were long gone. Stella Muir died in 1984 at the age of 83, long after the crowds that once packed Briggate to see her had faded away.
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