A fact from Zita Moulton appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 20 September 2022 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that actress Zita Moulton first starred in theatre performances after a bet with her fiancé that she would be able to get a stage job within 24 hours?
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The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
... that for promotion of the film Modern Marriage, actress Zita Moulton was involved in the first "personal appearance" tour done by film actors? Source: "After the movie opened, Gordon and the film's other actors toured the United States, acting out the first reel on theater stages. It was history's first "personal appearance" - Ex-actress, 104, dies in El Paso, El Paso Times
Overall: The article is new enough, long enough, neutrally written and copyvio tools finds no issues. I like the first hook but am approving ALT1 as I think that a claim as big as "the first personal appearance" probably needs slightly more convincing evidence than one line in a short obit. DrThneed (talk) 00:18, 29 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The given birth year of 1883 follows from the claim in her obituary that she was 104 years old when she died in 1987. However, IMBD lists her birth date as May 9, 1896 and given the evidence, I think it's worth considering that the obituary may be incorrect.
Consider the 1953 interview in the El Paso Herald, in which she says "I imagine they knew I was only 16. I went to Toronto, Canada, and was with a stock company there for two weeks. Then I went with another company for five months and from there, I had a role in the Broadway production of Toto." That seems to indicate that these three jobs were in succession. If she had been born in 1883, then there was at least a 21 year gap between her first stage job at 16 (1899) and her appearance in Toto in 1921 that is completely glossed over in the phrase "and from there..." The announcement of her casting in 'Toto' Stage News from April 2021 says she was "recently with Willard Mack, lending further credence to the fact there was no such gap in her employment.
Additional indications to the contrary: if she was born in 1883, that means she began her film career in her 40s, at a time when women were considered to have "aged out" of Hollywood by age 30. She would have been 46 years old in this picture from 1929: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/106688062/in-stage-and-screen-comedies/ ... possible, but I personally don't buy it.
I'm not going to edit the body of the article at this time, because we need sources to pin down her birth date (or at least year). But I did think the discrepancy was worth mentioning here for future research. 97.102.30.205 (talk) 16:20, 20 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for taking the time to look into that. Yeah, it seems likely that they got her age wrong. We'll need to see if there's any sources out there with the correct date. I presume whomever added it to IMDB must have had some sort of source to have an accurate birth date like that. SilverserenC22:53, 20 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The article is new enough, long enough, neutrally written and copyvio tools finds no issues. I like the first hook but am approving ALT1 as I think that a claim as big as "the first personal appearance" probably needs slightly more convincing evidence than one line in a short obit. DrThneed (talk) 00:18, 29 August 2022 (UTC)