Elsie Janis

Elsie Janis, born Elsie Bierbower on March 16, 1889, in Marion, Ohio, was an actress, singer, songwriter, composer, screenwriter, and radio announcer whose Broadway career spanned from 1905 to 1939. The daughter of Josephine Janis and John Eleazer Bierbower, she had one brother, Percy John. Her stage debut came in 1896 at Columbus's Southern Theatre in a production of East Lynne. By the age of eleven she had become a headliner on the vaudeville circuit, performing under the name Little Elsie before adopting the stage name Elsie Janis as her career matured.

Janis established herself as a prominent figure on both Broadway and the London stage, earning acclaim from critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Her Broadway credits included The Fair Co-ed, The Hoyden, and When We Were Forty-one, as well as The Vanderbilt Cup in 1906, The Slim Princess in 1911, and The Century Girl in 1916. She also appeared in the play Miss Information, the 1919 revue Elsie Janis and Her Gang, and Puzzles of 1925. On October 5, 1925, she performed at the grand opening of the Brown Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky.

During World War I, Janis became one of the first prominent American entertainers to perform for troops near the front lines, traveling accompanied by her mother. She raised funds for Liberty Bonds and advocated on behalf of both British and American soldiers, earning the enduring designation "the sweetheart of the AEF," a reference to the American Expeditionary Force. Ten days after the armistice, she recorded several numbers from her revue Hullo, America for His Master's Voice, among them "Give Me the Moonlight, Give Me the Girl." She documented her wartime experiences in the 1919 book The Big Show: My Six Months with the American Expeditionary Forces and later recreated them in Behind the Lines, a 1926 Vitaphone musical short. In 1919 she also became a foster mother to Michael Cardi, a fourteen-year-old Italian war orphan and veteran.

Prior to the war, Janis had shared the stage with English actor-singer Basil Hallam in The Passing Show of 1915, and the two entered into a romantic relationship, establishing a home together in Liverpool, England. The couple never married. Hallam was killed in August 1916 at the Battle of the Somme while serving with the Royal Flying Corps.

Alongside her stage work, Janis pursued a career in Hollywood as an actress, screenwriter, production manager, and composer. She co-wrote the original story for Close Harmony in 1929 with Gene Markey and served as composer and production manager on Paramount on Parade in 1930. Working with director Edmund Goulding, she co-wrote the song "Love, Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere" for Gloria Swanson's talkie debut, The Trespasser, in 1929. Her song "Oh, Give Me Time for Tenderness" appeared in the 1939 Bette Davis film Dark Victory, also directed by Goulding. Her final film credit was Women in War in 1940.

In 1934, Janis became the first female announcer on the NBC radio network. That same decade, in 1932, she married Gilbert Wilson, who was sixteen years her junior, a union that generated public attention at the time. The couple lived in the historic Philipsburg Manor House in Sleepy Hollow, New York, until both were seriously injured in an automobile accident in the area. Following the accident, Janis relocated to the Los Angeles area, where she remained for the rest of her life. She had previously maintained a private home called ElJan on the east side of High Street in Columbus, Ohio, across from Ohio State University's Ohio Field, which she sold after her mother's death.

Elsie Janis died on February 26, 1956, at her home in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of sixty-six. She was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. For her contributions to the motion picture industry, she holds a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6776 Hollywood Boulevard.