MARJORIE BELL, this month's RADIO MIRROR cover girl, is a very pretty young lady who would just as soon not be so pretty. If that sounds crazy, remember that acting is a crazy profession.
Marjorie's ambition is to be a good actress, both in radio and on the stage. But she has discovered that when a pretty girl, smartly and neatly dressed, walks into a producer's office his first thought is that if she's so good looking she probably can't act. "Really," Marjorie says bitterly, "the only way to impress most of them is to come in looking as dowdy and unattractive as possible. Then they think, 'This girl looks so awful she must be intelligent, and if she's intelligent she ought to be a good actress.'
So far, Marjorie's career has progressed to the point where she is heard practically every Saturday noon as one of the players in the Armstrong Theater of Today, over CBS. Of course, you hear her other times too. Like all radio actors and actresses, she is apt to bob up in a "one-shot" on almost any dramatic program, day or night. On Junior Miss, for instance, she was in the dramatized commercials.
Her real last name is Belcher -- she's the daughter of Ernest Belcher, well known West Coast ballet teacher, who has trained many dancers for the movies. Marjorie's own dancing debut -- of course she learned to dance! -- was made at the age of thirteen in the Hollywood Bowl. Three years later she went on the air for the first time, in an interview with her father who had a twice-weekly program on a Los Angeles station.
Her dancing ability came in pretty handy for the next four years. It got her a job with the Disney studios, where she was the artists' model for the dancing figures of Snow White and the Blue Fairy in "Pinocchio." She even modeled for the dancing hippopotamus in the "Dance of the Hours" sequence of "Fantasia," although in this case it's only fair to point out that it was just her movements that were copied, not her figure.
In between chores at the Disney studio she acted on a Saturday-morning children's program on a Los Angeles station, toured the Pacific Coast in a company playing Noel Coward's "Tonight and finally came to at 8:30," New York with a vaudeville troupe.
As proof of how serious she is about being a good actress, Marjorie studied drama with Maria Ouspenskaya, the wonderful old lady you've seen in so many movies. Since she's been in the east, Marjorie has made one summer-stock appearance and is now waiting eagerly for the theatrical season to start on Broadway. She says she can't think of anything better than being on the air in the day and on the stage at night.
