Leona Anderson: How a silent film star became a horrifying outsider musician
Movie stars attempting music careers are a dime a dozen these days.
In fact, some of the biggest stars of the day got their start in film and TV. Ariana Grande, Drake and Olivia Rodrigo all started out as actors before they decided to try their hand at music, which worked out pretty well, all things considered. At least a damn sight than it did for Leighton Meester, Jeremy Renner, and Eddie Murphy. Then you’ve got Vin Diesel’s baffling foray into tropical house with ‘Feel Like I Do’. Christ only knows how one should feel about that.
This feels like a modern phenomenon. In today’s world, everyone in the entertainment industry is a triple threat of some kind. Honed for stardom of some kind since they were barely out of the cot. Thus, it stands to reason that if you can act, you can also sing and dance. However, this actually brings to mind an earlier kind of stardom. A pre-1960s visage of movie stardom where the popularity of musicals both on stage and on screen meant that if you wanted to be a star, you as better off working on your pipes as you were your Shakespeare.
However, past and present, the vast majority of actors who’ve tried their hand at music have tried their hand at pop stardom. Which also makes sense. If you’ve got a platform as huge as movie stardom, you want to capitalise on it in a way that will make your millions of fans happy, while also getting the eyes of as many music fans on you as possible to boost your profile even further. If this is all sounding pretty cynical, that’s because it absolutely is.
Perhaps a few more of these Hollywood stars should take a tip from Leona Anderson.
Who was Leona Anderson?
Truth be told, these stars would be better off taking tips about music from Leona Anderson than they would about movie stardom. One of the original nepo babies, Anderson was the younger sister of Broncho Billy Anderson, who founded Essanay Studios in 1907. Turns out, being the kid sister of one of the first studio heads in American cinema does wonderful things for your career, and Anderson nabbed a few roles in Essan’s first motion pictures. While never a star, she was always working and managed to share the screen with several of the most famous faces of the day.
In 1915, she acted opposite Charlie Chaplin in In the Park. In 1922, she shared a screen with Stan Laurel for Mud and Sand. Soon after that, the acting roles almost completely dried up. She wouldn’t breach the public eye proper until the 1950s, when she had one of the most baffling comebacks imaginable. She started marketing herself as the comedy act ‘The World’s Most Horrible Singer’ and, credit where it’s due, the woman wasn’t far off. Her shrieking, keening soprano sounded more like scraping cutlery than anything someone would put on for pleasure.
Yet, in the world of alternative comedy, she became an icon. A few appearances on the high-profile radio show The Ernie Kovacs Show led to a record deal, followed by one of the most notorious works of outsider work ever released, her 1957 album Music To Suffer By. Leona Anderson herself swore blind that the act was a way of lampooning pretentious opera stars at the time, but one wonders how many people were laughing with her, as opposed to the other option.
The joke was ultimately on the audience, though. They were the ones giving money to one of the worst singers in the music scene and allowing her to become the star she’d always wanted to be. Probably not the way she imagined it happening for her, but hey, it worked.