Vegetarian Movie Stars - Who Came First?
With the list of notable vegetarians reading like an invitation list for Oscars night, it is not unusual for someone to ask "How did it all start?" Perhaps surprisingly, it is not a recent trend, but something that goes back some 90 years, to when the movie business was still new.
In the early days of the movies, Mary Pickford was the biggest star in Hollywood - even more popular than her friend and business partner, Charlie Chaplin. Specialising in playing cute children like Little Lord Fauntleroy and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (she was only five feet tall and had a young face), she was known as "America's Sweetheart" - and later, due to her global fame, "The World's Sweetheart".
Mary gave up meat and fish after reading "The Jungle", Upton Sinclair's disturbing expose of the meat industry in New York, with vivid descriptions of the assembly-line slaughterhouses. "It was too much for some of the visitors," wrote Sinclair (who himself became a vegetarian), "and the women would stand with hands clenched and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears starting in their eyes."
Pickford, however, was not the only vegetarian Hollywood star of the early days. English actor George Arliss, already a popular star of the American theatre, entered movies in the 1921. At a time when vegetarianism in the West seemed peculiar and eccentric, he was a pioneer. "Doesn't it seem probable that many of our diseases are the result of meat eating?" he once asked. "It's an unpleasant habit... eating kidneys and liver and picking the bones... We shudder at the very thought of cannibals, but is there really any difference?"
Another great silent film star, Gloria Swanson, would also follow her rival Mary Pickford into a vegetarian diet. Other early stars dabbled in it. Marion Davies, one of the top comediennes of the 1920s, temporarily became a vegetarian after playing hostess to visiting Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, an outspoken member of the London Vegetarian Society.
However, though they might have been the first, these stars were not as outspoken about their vegetarianism as current stars. Unlike Woody Harrelson or Toni Collette, they did not campaign for animal rights, or publicly extol the virtues of a vegetarian diet to stay young and slim. Stars of 80 or 90 years ago were not encouraged to speak their minds in such a way.
However, as Pickford was Hollywood's most popular hostess, her meat-free diet would have been known to the fanzines and industry figures of the day (though it might have been considered eccentric). Today's stars, able to choose from a number of chic vegetarian cafés and restaurants around Hollywood, can salute her. In this way (along with many others), she was a pioneer among celebrities.
Related Tags: vegetarianism
Noivedya Juddery is a writer and journalist based in Australia. A member of the Sri Chinmoy Centre, he is inspired by personal meditation and spirituality in his growing number of creative activities. He can be contacted via his website: http://www.markjuddery.com/
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