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Cissy Fitzgerald article

Fitzgerald’s was best recognized for her left-eye wink. This winking was uncontrollable due to an extra amount of tension in her orbicular muscles. While this wink was her trade mark in the industry, it was quite controversial and was also troublesome. She did not have much control over the twitch, and her wink outside of the studio was sometimes taken as a promiscuity. Cissy Fitzgerald’s wink provides a productive example for feminist historians, filmmakers, and producers today, struggling to investigate and identify with the gender contradictions of early film entertainment. The constant repetitive image of Cissy’s wink in her performance caused the stage comedian involuntarily to imbrute her own gestures. This somehow caused the media reproducibility to provide an eased nature to Cissy’s disorder.

Cissy Fitzgerald did not transition from short films to motion pictures until 1914. This was after the nickelodeon years of film, when the industry had been widely seen as a respectable, middle-class business. Fitzgerald took a hiatus from her acting to get married to Oliver Mark Tucker in Great Britain and travel the world to celebrate their marriage. Cissy and her new husband had visited India, Africa, Australia, China, until the start of World War I. This had caused Cissy Fitzgerald to come back to the United States to re-launch her film career.

Cissy Fitzgerald was signed with several film companies during her time as an actress. These companies include Kleine Studios, Vitagraph, Casino Studios, and Broadway Star Studios. Fitzgerald was shot in about twenty films during her career between 1914 and 1917. In most of these films, she was playing a comedic character, but occasionally displayed a different facet of her talents, for example, her performance in The Esterbrook Case, a which was a melodrama with a subtle hint of a mystery theme.

Fitzgerald took a break from acting in films from 1916 until the beginning of 1921. Later in 1921, Cissy was featured in five comedies she produced in her own production company called “Cissy Fitzgerald Productions.” Her company was a small business located on the West Coast of America. Cissy Fitzgerald is credited as being the first female to producer film. The films she starred in under “Cissy Fitzgerald Productions” were merchandized as “refined comedies,” and included “Cissy’s Saucy Stockings”, “Seeing America Thirst”, “Cissy Invades Bohemia”, “Cissy’s Economy”, and “Comes Back Cissy”. Cissy Fitzgerald reinvented herself yet again after her short time of producing films as a feature film actress in the 1920s and the 1930s. She was filmed in many silent and sound films of a plethora of genres, many of which are still existing. The most commonly known of these feature film parts is Cissy as Giancinta in Laugh, Clown, Laugh of 1928, a Lon Chaney film about a circus clown who cannot seem to cheer up, that befriends an Italian count who seems to be embodied by uncontrollable fits of laughter. Because Fitzgerald as Giancinta is a minor character, it is speculated that the histories of Fitzgerald’s uncontrollable winking from her eye condition must have limited the importance of her role in Laugh, Clown, Laugh.