Elise Cavanna

Elise Alyse Cavanna, born Elise Alyse Seeds on January 30, 1902, in Germantown, Philadelphia, was an American stage comedian, dancer, film actress, and fine artist who died on May 12, 1963, in Hollywood, California. Throughout her career she used several names, including Elise Seeds, Alyse Seeds, Elise Armitage, Elise Cavanna, and Elise Welton. The daughter of Sally D. Burk and Thomas M. Seeds, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy and trained in dance under Isadora Duncan in Berlin, Germany.

Standing six feet tall and notably slender, Cavanna gave dance recitals in New York City before transitioning to a career as a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, where she appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918. Her Broadway work also included the play Morals, and she appeared on Broadway in 1925. Before entering film, she worked as a comedian alongside Joe Weber and Lew Fields.

Cavanna made her film debut in 1926 with Love 'Em and Leave 'Em, which starred Louise Brooks and Evelyn Brent. That same year she appeared with Brooks and W.C. Fields in It's the Old Army Game, playing an early morning customer. She went on to work with Fields in four additional films, with The Dentist being among the most notable. Her scenes in that film, in which she played a writhing patient of Fields's brutal dentist character, were considered so risqué that they were cut from television broadcasts decades later. Film historian William K. Everson compared her on-screen dynamic with Fields to that between Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont. Cavanna continued working in film through the late 1930s, accumulating more than twenty screen credits.

In 1932, while living in Los Angeles, Cavanna married Merle Armitage, a writer, book designer, musician, and WPA administrator who lived from 1893 to 1975. Her marriage drew her increasingly toward visual art and art social circles. In September 1933 she exhibited six abstract lithographs at Stendhals in Los Angeles, with a newspaper review noting the cool precision of her lines and tonal spots. In 1937 she completed Air Mail, a 16-by-6-foot oil-on-canvas painting for the post office in Oceanside, California, depicting a stylized airplane flying over a landscape resembling California.

Cavanna's work appeared in October 1949 in the contemporary section of the California Centennials Exhibition of Art at the Los Angeles County Museum at Exposition Park, alongside oils, watercolors, and prints by other twentieth-century artists. In 1954 the Los Angeles Art Association exhibited her work at 2425 Wilshire Boulevard as part of a showing featuring four artists known collectively as Functionists West: Stephen Longstreet, Helen Lundeberg, Lorser Feitelson, and Cavanna. By that time she signed her work simply as Elise. She and Feitelson showed only nonobjective paintings, with both artists employing flat-colored, near-geometrical forms that either opposed or complemented one another. Cavanna was among the first nonobjective painters in southern California.

In 1961 Cavanna and her husband James Welton co-authored Gourmet Cookery for a Low Fat Diet, a book containing 200 recipes for fatless meals. She died of cancer on May 12, 1963, at the age of 61, and is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.