Even in 1911, commentators scoffed at the idea of someone being permanently blinded by merely looking at a flash of lightning: in his largely positive review of Water Lilies, the critic for The Nickelodeon singled out just such a scene for his complaint: “No stage trickery could have made it convincing anyhow, because it seems to be inherently impossible.” Apparently, he hadn’t been reading the newspapers, which not infrequently featured just such stories. It’s true the scene in Water Lilies is weakly staged, but clearly the unidentified director and writer were more interested in the consequences of Maurice’s loss of sight rather than the cause. For without an ability to see, the young man couldn’t take in the terpsichorean magnificence of the film’s raison d’être, its star Baroness Irmgard von Rottenthal.
She was born in Croatia circa 1890, the daughter of Baron Josef von Rothenthal, an illegitimate son of Prince Heinrich XX Reuß – why she changed the spelling to Rottenthal remains a mystery. By 1906 she was in the U.S., where she became a pupil of Rita Sacchetto and Mrs. Richard Hovey, the latter a leading teacher of the Delsarte technique, a theory of movement and expression whose profound influence on modern dance is well known. Only recently however has the impact of François Delsarte and his acolytes on silent film acting been explored, and watching Rottenthal in Water Lilies offers a fascinating opportunity to see Delsartean technique brought whole to the screen. The Baroness is all about gesture, even when not dancing: her hands and arms are ultra-expressive in an almost pantomimic way, reflecting her moods and the beauties of nature. As poetically stated by Moving Picture World, she’s “like a thistle-down wafted by some gentle zephyr.” In the film she plays Albertina, a dancer for high society (not unlike herself) who falls in love with Maurice while she’s recovering at her aunt’s from heart trouble. When he’s struck blind, he claims not to love Albertina, so as to spare her the burden of looking after him; however, true love will out. Not everyone was enchanted – the critic for Moving Picture News grumbled, “The young lady should never have been allowed to run at large. Her place was in a padded cell.”
In the early-to-mid-1910s, she was high society’s preferred artiste at charity functions, performing her interpretive dances in the mansions of Manhattan, Newport, Chicago, and beyond. Among her most popular roles were “Temptation of Eve,” dressed in two giant fig leaves, “Schmerzen,” performed (incredibly) with 30 pounds of chains on her wrists, and “Gold Fish,” praised for its fidelity to nature. In 1914, Rodney Lee of the Toledo Blade enthused, “The Baroness possesses to an unusual degree the power of expressing various emotions by a glance of the eye, a turn of the head, and the use of her long, shapely hands.” The self-same hands, it was said, which had been admired by Rodin himself.
Rottenthal’s film appearances are few: after Water Lilies, she was absent from screens until Kalem’s Midnight at Maxim’s (1915), where she does two specialty numbers; later that year she was seen in Hearst-Selig News Pictorial No. 61, dancing in New York’s Central Park. By late 1916 Rottenthal disappears from the press entirely, most likely because her German surname wasn’t the best calling card in the lead-up to America’s entry into the War. Rottenthal died in New York in 1935, three years after the death of her second husband. My research into the life and career of this fascinating figure is ongoing.

Jay Weissberg