The cinema is thought to have opened around 1912 as The Scala. A company called The Scala Electric Palace (Withington) Ltd was registered in 1912, and in the 1914 Yearbook of "Kinematograph Weekly" the cinema is listed as having opened in January 1913 as The Scala Picturedrome. It was the third cinema to open in Britain, and by the time of its closure in 2001 it was the third longest-running cinema in the country. Its original single-screen auditorium had been fitted with 675 seats. Before the advent of "talkies", the Scala had a resident female cinema pianist, and the conductor Sir John Barbirolli once played the piano to accompany the silent films. Violet Carson, who went on to play Ena Sharples in Coronation Street, was also a resident pianist. During the 1930s the popularity of the new "picture houses" grew rapidly, with 109 in Manchester at its peak. Many people visited The Scala three or four times a week. The craze for cinema-going was seen by some as a social ill of its time; school teachers complained that pupils were not doing their homework because they were spending too much time at the cinema. One regular movie-goer at the cinema in the 1920s was Robert Donat, a local boy who went on to become an Oscar-winning actor.