In the early 1930s, when beauty contests still promised fairy-tale ascents and the line between art, fashion, and show business blurred nightly under marquee lights, Alice Anthon briefly became a name to watch. Newspapers described her with a mix of reverence and amazement: “the perfect artist’s model,” “New York’s most beautiful artist’s model,” a young woman whose form was judged so classically ideal that painters, sculptors, and photographers competed for her presence. Her career flared brightly, crossing from the studios of Manhattan to the stages of Broadway and, finally, to Hollywood—before ending with tragic suddenness at just twenty-one.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Alice Anthon was born May 4, 1914, in White Plains, New York. The daughter of Vincent Anthon (born in Messina, Italy) and Natalie Messina (also Italian born), Alice was raised in New York at a time when vestiges of Old-World concepts of beauty and proportion still ruled. By her late teens Alice had developed into a beautiful young woman with a physical symmetry that could not long go unnoticed by those in the right professions. She entered—and won—a model competition held by the New York Daily Mirror newspaper early in her teens and from there she became known as a modern-day Venus.
News of her exploits made headlines. Reporters wrote that Alice Anthon had posed for famous painters and sculptors who captured her likeness on canvas, stone and paper. She graced the frontispieces of magazines and periodicals; her image was reproduced and distributed as the epitome of voluptuous beauty when American artists still modeled their ideals on ancient Greece and Rome. But Alice didn't want to sit still on a pedestal all day. She wanted action, music, and applause.
By the mid-thirties she had crossed over into dancing and staging for revue productions that allowed her body to move.
Her specialties included a dance routine billed as "Snake's Hips," frequently highlighted in reviews for its sleekness and tempered vigor. While she may have only performed one number in a show, reviewers were adamant that her memory would not soon fade. She was listed prominently in advertisements, and her name alone was often placed in the newspaper without qualification.
As usual, Hollywood took notice of beauty already blessed by the New York press. Alice moved west and found work as a movie extra. Extras, always waiting in large crowds just off camera during film production, were among the few avenue's performers had to becoming studio contracted. In 1934, she had an undetermined role in the Claude Raines film, Crime Without Passion.
She resided at 2017 North Argyle Avenue, steps away from the epicenter of the movie colony during a time where Vine Street and adjacent blocks swarmed with youth ready to burst into motion at a moment's notice between auditions and dance class. While still a beginner in switching careers from East Coast art model to aspiring movie actress, many of her peers' felt Alice was destined for greater things.
That potential was cruelly snatched away on January 11, 1936, when Alice Anthon passed away in Los Angeles due to advanced bilateral pulmonary tuberculosis. She was 21 years old. On her death certificate, her occupation is listed as “movie extra,” a haunting testament to how brief of a chapter her time in Hollywood was. The informant was director Arthur Rosson, and on January 15 she was laid to rest in the Rosson family plot at Hollywood Cemetery (Garden of Legends, Sect. 8, Lot 44) among countless others who had come west chasing the promise of success.
Alice Anthon was forgotten swiftly, as many names were to become lost in an industry hell-bent on pursuing the next big thing. But Alice lives on through the flimsy paper trails she left behind. Columns from newspapers yellowed with age, singing her praises of perfection. Stage bills announcing her arrival. Alice Anthon was more than just a pretty face to ogle at from afar.
Alice Anthon on one of her many magazine covers
She was a muse to the artists of her day, a model who set the standard of perfection. She was a dancer who could interpret shape into movement. And she was a girl on the cusp of the Hollywood dream.
Today, at Hollywood Forever, Alice Anthon rests among the immortals—not because her career reached its full potential, but because it did not. In that unfinished arc lies the quiet poignancy of her legacy: a reminder of how swiftly promise can vanish, and how even the briefest lives can leave enduring traces in art, memory, and history.
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