The Cameo

The cinema opened as the King's Cinema on 8 January 1914. The original screen was mirrored, the first mirrored screen in Scotland. There were 673 seats in an auditorium showing silent films with orchestral accompaniment, supplied at one time by Madam Egger's Ladies' Costume Orchestra. In 1930 the cinema was fitted for sound and started showing talkies. The space has been left largely unchanged structurally, but the audience now have better sightlines and more comfort, with less than half the original number of seats. There is an abundance of ornamental plasterwork: columns, cornices, decorative mouldings on walls and ceilings.

Behind a modern shopfront, much of the cinema's original architectural character remains. The entrance lobby has a terrazzo floor and one of the original pair of ticket kiosks. An inner foyer leads to the main cinema built within the 'back green' or 'back court' (courtyard) of a tenement block. Cinemas were once built like this elsewhere in Scotland, the biggest being the Rosevale in Partick, but the Cameo is the only one still operating.

The cinema appears in Sylvain Chomet's film The Illusionist. While hiding from the young couple, the main character, Tatischeff, accidentally enters the cinema, where Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle is playing. This is an in-joke as Tatischeff is largely based on Tati, the film itself having been adapted from a script of his. Other films with scenes filmed inside the Cameo include Helena Bonham Carter's Women Talking Dirty and Richard Jobson's A Woman in Winter. The cinema serves as the inspiration for the fictional Paradise Cinema in the novel Children of Paradise by Canadian-born author Camilla Grudova, after Grudova spent a period of time working there following her relocation to Scotland.