Christine Ell. Owner of the club “Christine’s” in the Greenwich Village, which she started in around 1918/1919. She was also a member of the Prvincetown Players.
Ell was the illegitimate daughter of a Danish serving girl and a German army officer. When she and her family came to America, she was placed in service by her mother and step-father, then forced into factory work when she was still a child. Seduced by her step-father, a laborer named Lockhaven, Ell left home when she was 14 and moved to Denver, where she became a prostitute. Inspired by the lectures of Emma Goldman, Ell followed her back to New York.
She married Louis B. Ell, whom she loved, but had extramarital affairs with the two O’Neill brothers.
Charlie Chaplin cast her as “Louise, a Maid” in his 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux (1947).
According to historian Paul Avrich, the original of Anna Christie (from the 1921 play Anna Christie, by Eugene O’Neill) was Christine Ell. She is in part also the model for Josie Hogan, from another of O’Neill’s plays, A Moon for the Misbegotten.
- "Described by her friend Agnes Boulton as “tall and voluptuous, with the ugliest face ever seen on a woman … and the most gorgeous, the most wonderful pile of red–gold hair..." https://www.jeweltheatre.net/.../Character-Josie-Hogan.pdf
- "... she became friendly with Christine Ell, a flamboyant redhead who had just opened a self-named restaurant..." https://books.google.it/books?id=6e-GshOGqsIC&pg=PA149...
- "There Christine Ell, a cheerful red-headed woman whose husband was the stage carpenter for the Provincetown..." https://books.google.it/books?id=AdRw9A2a8K8C&pg=PA135...
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| A photograph of a painting by Charles Ellis showing, from bottom left to right: James Light, Charles (“Hutch”) Collins, Christine Ell, “Jig” Cook, and O’Neill |
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| Christine Ell as the maid Louise in Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux |
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