Dolores Costello: "Merthy, merthy, have you no thither of your own?"

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"Vitaphone was a sexist technology, recording and reproducing men's voices more accurately than women's"
Richard Barrios, A Song In The Dark The Birth Of The Musical Film

"Dolores Costello's voice, in life relatively warm and attractive, did not come through adequately on the Vitaphone discs. Exacerbated by intense self conscioisness and poorly written dialogue, her feeble delivery was up there on the screen for everyone to hear and see. She was not helped my Michael Curtiz's inadequate direction, horrendous tension on the set, and by another mechanical failing, a tendency toward sibilance. The lisp, though Costello got the rap for it, was Vitaphone's, usually caused by a deadly combination of primitive amplifiers and worn discs. In this case it rendered one of her lines as "Merthy, merthy, have you no thither of your own?" To make matters worse, she was completely stymied by the notion that visual and vocal acting could be corellated into a seamless whole."
Richard Barrios, A Song in The Dark The Birth Of The Musical Film

"The greater difficulty lay in her inability to properly combine speech with gesture for the camera. As it was with her so would it be repeated with a number of silent stars, most legendarily John Gilbert, due not so much to bad voices as inadequately coordinated performances of poorly written dialogue, aggravated by changing audience tastes."
Richard Barrios, A Song In The Dark The Birth Of The Musical Film
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Spoke with a severe lisp until about 1930. When talkies replaced silent films, she worked with a speech pathologist for almost two years to get rid of her lisp.
IMDB trivia for Dolores Costello
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Costello spoke with a lisp, and found it difficult to make the transition to talking pictures, but after two years of voice coaching she was comfortable speaking before a microphone.
reference.com entry for Dolores Costello
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Costello spoke with a lisp and found it difficult to make the transition to talking pictures, but after two years of voice coaching she was comfortable speaking before a microphone.
wikpedia.com entry for Dolores Costello
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But as with Tenderloin, criticism of the still underdeveloped sound techniques was harsh, the long-suffering Miss Costello once again the most obvious target. Costello's slight lisp was exacerbated by the studio's sound-on-disc system -- not quite as bad as the satirical Singing in the Rain (1952) would later suggest, but enough for the actress to face an uncertain future in "talkies."
N.Y. Times review of Glorious Betsy
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