One of the early actresses of American silent films was the elegant and funny Charlotte Mineau.

In a career that lasted from 1912 until the early 1930s, “Lottie” Mineau appeared in at least 65 films-perhaps as many as 82- with such stars as Wallace Beery, Francis X. Bushman, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Mary Pickford, the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and other still familiar names.

Many on-line filmography sites describe Charlotte Mineau as a statuesque Paris-born and Sorbonne-educated silent film star.

She was indeed tall.

However, Charlotte “Lottie” Mineau was born in Escanaba on March 24, 1886, to an Escanaba police officer, Adolph Mineau, and his wife.

When Charlotte was a little more than two months old, her 28-year-old father drowned at Chandler’s Falls during a fishing outing.

His father-in-law, Charles Mayotte, and three other men, one of whom was probably Adolph’s brother-in-law, Felix Mayotte, were with him but were unable to save him.

Charles Mayotte was a saloonkeeper at 421 Ludington St., and Felix was a clerk at the saloon.

The little Mineau family lived in Wells at the time of Adolph’s death but Mrs. Mineau and Charlotte later moved to Escanaba, most likely to live with or near the Mayottes.

Charlotte attended school in Escanaba, but she is not listed among those who graduated high school.

Charlotte seems to have been an independent career girl, undoubtedly out of necessity.

As a teenager she studied stenography at Green Bay Business College, then returned to Escanaba, where she worked as a stenographer for O. V. Linden, as a store clerk at Rathfon’s and Gessner’s department stores, and as a telephone operator.

In 1907 she was boarding at 1207 Hale (now 2nd Avenue South).

In 1910 she went to Chicago to seek work as a stenographer.

Lottie Mineau may have sought her fortune in stenography, but she found it at Essanay.

Essanay Film Manufacturing Company was a motion picture studio founded in Chicago in 1907 by George Kirke Spoor and Gilbert “Broncho Billy” Anderson.

Most filmographies list “The Usual Way,” in which Charlotte co-starred with Wallace Beery in 1913, as her first credited role.

However, an Essanay produced short with James C. Carroll and Charlotte Mineau entitled “The Little Poet” was released in January of 1912.

She later played in the George Ade fables and starred with Wallace Beery in the “Sweedie” series.

A 1915 Chicago Tribune news item reported that Charlotte, calling on her U.P. experience, won the studio’s skating championship at a rink behind the building, then located on Argyle Street in the Uptown neighborhood.

Charlie Chaplin joined Essanay in 1914.

In the only film he made at Essanay in Chicago (there was also an Essanay-West studio in California), Charlotte Mineau had a major supporting role.

Chaplin was already one of the best know movie actors in the world, but when their film, “His New Job,” played in Escanaba, Lottie Mineau’s credit came before Chaplin’s in the Bijou Theater’s advertisement in the Daily Press.

She may have been Charlotte to the rest of the world, but she was still Lottie to Escanaba.

When Chaplin left Essanay and Chicago for Mutual Studios and California, Charlotte Mineau also moved west, and she worked for Chaplin for two years, then worked on a series of films with other popular actors.

She spent the rest of her very long life in Los Angeles.

A Daily Press article in 1929 invited her friends from Escanaba to contact her at 803 North St. Andrews Place in Los Angeles.

Charlotte was married to fellow actor Christian J. Frank.

Frank died in 1967; Charlotte died in 1979 at the age of 93.

Charlotte Mineau was very attractive.

However, she was an uncommonly tall woman, especially next to the diminutive Chaplin, and she was almost 26 years old when she played in her first film.

As a result, she was usually cast in supporting roles-the society matron or the mother of the heroine- and usually in comedies.

She was occasionally cast as the heavy.

She played the glamorous but villainous Russian Mme. Thamar Fedoreska in “Rosemary Climbs the Heights” in 1918.

Eight years later, after initially being rejected as too attractive, she won the part of another villain, Mrs. Grimes, in “Sparrows,” starring Mary Pickford, by making herself look “slatternly and careworn.”

That year, 1926, when the average American earned less than $38 a week, Miss Mineau was under studio contract for $350 a week.

Her last role was a brief appearance in “Monkey Business” with the Marx Brothers in 1931.

By then the talkies had superseded the silent movies, and Charlotte did not make the transition.

As silent movies became obsolete, most of the films (by some estimates as many as 90 percent) were lost -destroyed, disintegrated, or discarded – and many of the actors were nearly forgotten.

A 1954 Daily Press column by Clint Dunathan recalled the nearly forgotten actress and reflected on her career: “There was one name once known to movie goers across the land, and the owner of the name was an Escanaba young woman who graduated from telephone operator to the silent movies. She was Charlotte (Lottie) Mineau. The pretty brunette was featured in the old days of silent films with some of the famous male stars of Hollywood, including Charles Chaplin. But Lottie, like Dorothy Kenyon and Violet Van, is gone and forgotten. . . .”

Not quite forgotten.

Many of the remaining badly damaged silent films are being digitally repaired and restored.

Charlotte Mineau’s work has fared better than that of most silent film stars, partly because she was in films that were popular at the time, and therefore had many copies, but primarily because a number of those films have become classics.

The Internet has produced a kind of revival of silent movies, allowing fans to share obscure films that are not commercially viable.

Many of Charlotte’s films are available online, both free and for sale. Several, including “His New Job” (Chaplin, 1915), “A Night in the Show” (Chaplin, 1915), “The Floorwalker” (Chaplin, 1916), “The Vagabond” (Chaplin, 1916), “The Rink” (Chaplin, 1916), “Easy Street” (Chaplin, 1917), “The Rogue” (Chaplin, 1918), “The Lion and the Souse” (directed by Harry Edwards, 1924), “Get ’em Young” (Laurel and Hardy), “Love ’em and Weep” (Laurel and Hardy, 1927), “Sugar Daddies” (Laurel and Hardy, 1927), and “Monkey Business” (the Marx Brothers, 1931) are posted on YouTube.

—

*Editor’s Note: This story first appeared in the December 2014 edition of the Delta County Historical Society’s ‘Delta Historian’