Shipman, Nell, 1892-1970

Nell Shipman's life in show business began on the repertory and vaudeville stages and spanned the eras of silent film, radio, the talkies, and television. She toured with the likes of Jesse Lasky, Paul Gilmore, Dick Sutton, and Charles A. Taylor in the first decade of the twentieth century, made silent films in the 1910s and 20s, and spent the next forty years writing novels, plays, film scenarios, and short stories. She lived in Los Angeles and New York, Miami and Seattle, New England, Arizona, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., but it was in Idaho where she came closest to achieving her dream: making movies on her own, on location in the wild, with complete creative and artistic control. That experience came to an abrupt and bitter end, but Nell never gave up her dream and remembered Priest Lake, Idaho, as her "Ultima Thule, the one spot in all God's world where [she] belonged". [Nell Shipman, The Silent Screen & My Talking Heart, 3rd ed. (Boise: Boise State University, Hemingway Western Studies Center, 2001) p.108 (p. 110 in 1st and 2nd editions). Hereafter abbreviated SS&MTH ].

Nell Shipman was born Helen Foster Barham on October 25, 1892, in Victoria, British Columbia. [Details of Nell Shipman's early life and career through 1925 are derived mainly from SS&MTH . Page numbers in the third edition (2001) are given first, followed by the first and second edition page numbers in parentheses]. Her British-born parents, Rose and Arnold Foster Barham, had come to Canada with her older brother Maurice just a few years before. While she was still small the family emigrated to the United States, settling in Seattle, Washington, where young Helen studied music and the dramatic arts. The Barhams made one trip to England when Nell was a child; it was after a visit to the theater in London (she wrote in her autobiography) that she knew she had to become an actress. When Paul Gilmore's traveling company came through Seattle, she convinced her parents and her drama teacher to allow her to audition for the role of ingénue in Gilmore's comedy, "At Yale." She won the part, and at age thirteen went on the road. From then on she was seldom at rest until her family finally convinced her to settle down and retire in California at the age of seventy-three. [ SS&MTH, pp. 1-6 (1-6)].

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