Who was Bessie Love and what is the Bowie connection?
I recently came across the above photo on social media identified as a colorized photo from 1919. The point was that, colorized, this very old image of a pretty girl looks contemporary— the past is not as alien as it seems. It turns out that the girl, from 1919, has a Bowie connection— in fact they were in a movie together.
The girl in the photo was named Bessie Love. She was a silent-movie star who made the transition to sound films. She appeared in a D. W. Griffith movie, Intolerance, in 1916, not too long after the birth of feature filmmaking. She was even nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in 1929 for her role in a movie called The Broadway Melody. That movie was significant because it won Best Picture that year and was the first sound film to do so. I’ve never seen it, but apparently it included a Technicolor sequence, which I didn’t even know was possible back then.
Despite all that, I don’t think The Broadway Melody or Bessie Love are terribly well-known today. That said, Love did not hang it up a century ago. She continued to act for most of the rest of her life and appeared in many, many films and TV episodes including some YOU HAVE SEEN (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Ragtime, Reds and many others).
That brings us to the Bowie connection. Bessie Love appears in The Hunger! It was her last role, and she appears only briefly, asking Susan Sarandon’s character to autograph a book. But the unwitting viewer might not catch on that the brief exchange is between two Academy Award-nominated actresses. Sarandon and co-star Catherine Deneuve were both nominated for Oscars (Sarandon five times, winning once), but the movie includes other accomplished actors like Love who you might miss. Another example is Willem Dafoe, who also appeared in two other movies with Bowie, Basquiat and The Last Temptation of Christ, in which his Jesus acts opposite Bowie’s Pilate.
The Hunger was Love’s last role. She passed away in 1986 at the age of 87 (yes, she was born in the 19th Century). The Hunger is in part a movie about aging and the passage of time. I don’t know if Love was cast in her brief role as some sort of commentary on those themes, but intentionally or not, it sure seems that way. Bowie’s character, John Blaylock, ages before our eyes in the movie. For those who paid attention, Bessie Love aged before the public eye, just over a much longer period of time. The process seemed to be far more fulfilling for Love!
