Texas Guinan

Texas Guinan

Broadway's legendary nightclub hostess, the toast of the Roaring Twenties, Texas Guinan (born Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan) actually came close to becoming the screen's first successful cowgirl star. In the late 1910s, Guinan appeared in a series of independent oaters -- The Gun Woman(1918), She Wolf (1919), The Wild Cat(1920), and others -- usually playing a Calamity Jane type of character, who softens up and settles down with a good man before the fadeout. But apparently Guinan's heart wasn't in it and she would become much more famous as a Broadway speakeasy proprietor whose legendary greeting of "Hello, suckers!" came to define an entire era. She returned to films as Queen of the Night Clubs (1929), but the Wall Street crash and the ensuing Depression put a damper on such frivolity. The irrepressible Guinan hit the road instead and was performing one-night stands in Vancouver, British Columbia, when she suddenly died from an intestinal infection. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide