Career Highlights: Power of a Lie, Don't Neglect Your Wife, The Dream Melody
First Major Screen Credit: Concert (1921)
Biography
A pleasingly plump ingenue of the late 1910s, Mabel Julienne Scott played the nominal leading lady in Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's serio-comic The Round-Up (1920). Scott's love interest in that film was actor/director Tom Forman and Forman was with her again that same year in The Sea Wolf, the second screen version of the Jack London classic. 1920 was a banner year for Scott but fame proved fleeting and she was playing minor roles by the end of the decade. A graduate of Northwestern Conservatory, Scott was the sister of William Scott, a juvenile actor best known for playing Mary Pickford's tenement beau in Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley (1918). ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide
In 1926 she played the role of the mother in The Lullaby, performed at the Pasadena Playhouse. One critic commented that Scott was uniquely suited to play the part for which she was cast. Her voice has all of the soft cadences of a woman loved and the shrill shriekings of a woman scorned. Other theatrical appearances of note are roles in Painted Faces, with comedian Joe E. Brown and The Copperhead, playing opposite John Barrymore.
Scott preferred acting in motion pictures to her work on the stage. In Behold My Wife (1920) she played the leading feminine role as Lali, an American Indian maiden. The film was produced by Famous Players.
She believed youth was a necessity to succeed in films. As the camera is more stringent than the eye, youth is not as essential in theater. Scott told an interviewer that the majority of successful stage actresses are middle-age and have a number of years of experience.
Scott was paired with Roscoe Arbuckle in the Paramount Pictures release, The Round Up (1920). She was contracted to George Medford Productions but made motion pictures for both Famous Players and the Samuel Goldwyn Company.