Actresses

Marguerite De La Motte (June 22, 1902 – March 10, 1950) was an American film actress, most notably of the silent film era. Career Born in Duluth, Minnesota, De La Motte began her entertainment career studying ballet under Anna Pavlova. In 1919 she became the dance star of Sid Grauman on the stage of his theater. In 1918, at the age of 16, she made her screen debut in the Douglas Fairbanks, Sr directed romantic comedy film Arizona. That same year she lost both of her parents in an automobile accident and film producer J.L. Frothingham assumed guardianship of her and her younger sister. De La Motte spent the 1920s appearing in numerous films, often cast by Douglas Fairba…

Amanda Tapping - Unknown Photoshoot

Rosalind Russell (June 4, 1907 – November 28, 1976) was an American actress of stage and screen, perhaps best known for her role as a fast-talking newspaper reporter in the Howard Hawks screwball comedy His Girl Friday, as well as the role of Mame Dennis in the film Auntie Mame. She won all 5 Golden Globes for which she was nominated, and was tied with Meryl Streep for wins until 2007 when Streep was awarded a sixth. Russell won a Tony Award in 1953 for Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Ruth in the Broadway show Wonderful Town. Russell was known for playing character roles, exceptionally wealthy, dignified ladylike women. She had a wide car…

Constance Collier (22 January 1878 – 25 April 1955) was a British-born American film actress and acting coach. Life and career Born Laura Constance Hardie, in Windsor, Berkshire, Collier made her stage debut at the age of 3, when she played Fairy Peasblossom in A Midsummer's Night Dream. In 1893, at the age of 15, she joined the Gaiety Girls, the famous dance troupe based at the Gaiety Theatre in London. She was a very beautiful woman and soon became so tall that she towered over all the other dancers. In addition, she had an enormous personality and considerable determination. She naturally attracted considerable attention. On 27 December 1906, Beerbohm Tree's extravag…

Shannon Day was born on August 5, 1896 in New York City. Shannon appeared in her first motion picture in 1921 in FORBIDDEN FRUIT. Numerous films followed in both bit parts and some with a little more meat to them. She was never to establish herself among the big names of the time however. Shannon retired from films after she appeared in HOTEL VARIETY in 1933. On February 24, 1977, Shannon died in the city of her birth at the age of 80. She had been in a total of 29 motion pictures

Teresa Wright (October 27, 1918 – March 6, 2005) was an American actress. Early life She was born Muriel Teresa Wright in Harlem, New York City, the daughter of Martha and Arthur Wright, who was an insurance agent. She grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey. During her years at Columbia High School, she became seriously interested in acting and spent her summers working in Provincetown theater productions. Following her high school graduation in 1938, she returned to New York and was hired to understudy the role of Emily (played by Dorothy McGuire and later Martha Scott) in Thornton Wilder's Our Town. She took over the role when Martha Scott went to Hollywood to make the film…

Marjorie Daw (January 19, 1902 – March 18, 1979) was an American film actress of the silent era. She appeared in 68 films between 1914 and 1927. Biography Born Margaret House in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Daw began acting as a teen to support her and her younger brother after the death of their parents. Daw made her film debut in 1914 and worked steadily during the 1920s. She retired from acting after the advent of sound film. Daw was married twice; her first marriage was to director A. Edward Sutherland and produced no children. After divorcing Sutherland in 1925, she married Myron Selznick in 1929. The marriage ended in 1942. Daw died on March 18, 1979 in Huntington…

Helene Chadwick (November 25, 1897–September 4, 1940) was an American actress in silent motion pictures and in early sound films. Early life and career Chadwick was born in the small town of Chadwick, New York, which was named for her grandfather. Her mother was a singer who performed on the stage and her father was a business man. She began making films for Pathe Pictures in Manhattan, New York. A director was impressed by Chadwicks's talent as an equestrian, thus she began acting as a western star but this did not continue with the exodus of film production from the east to the west coast. Signed by Samuel Goldwyn, Chadwick went to California in 1913 and entered sil…

Ethel Clayton (November 8, 1882 – June 6, 1966) was an American actress of the silent film era. Career Clayton's screen debut came in 1909, in a short called Justified. She jockeyed her early film appearances with a burgeoning stage career. Her pretty blond looks were reminiscient of the famous Gibson Girl drawings by Charles Dana Gibson. On the stage she appeared mainly in musicals or musical reviews such as The Ziegfeld Follies of 1911. These musical appearances indicate a singing talent Clayton may have possessed but went unused in her many silent screen performances. In 1912 she appeared in "The Country Boy" on stage at the Lyceum Theatre in Rochester New York and m…

Dorothy Dalton (September 22, 1893 – April 13, 1972) was an American silent film actress and stage personality who worked her way from a stock company to a movie career. Beginning in 1910, Dalton was a player in stock companies in Chicago and Holyoke, Massachusetts. She joined the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation vaudeville circuits. By 1914 she was in Hollywood. Career Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dalton made her movie debut in 1914 in Pierre of the Plains, co-starring Edgar Selwyn, followed by the lead role in Across the Pacific that same year. In 1915, she appeared with William S. Hart in The Disciple. This production came before she left Triangle Film Corporation and w…

Virginia Cherrill (April 12, 1908 - November 14, 1996) was an American actress best known for her role as the blind flower girl in Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931). Due to marrying an English earl in the 1940s, she is also known as Virginia Child-Villiers, Countess of Jersey. Virginia Cherrill was born on a farm in rural Carthage, Illinois, to James E. and Blanche Cherrill. She was a Chicago society girl with no thoughts of a film career when she went to Hollywood for a visit and met Charlie Chaplin when he sat next to her at a boxing match. He had failed to find the girl he wanted for his film but decided she would do and cast her in City Lights in which she gave th…

Thelma Alice Todd (July 29, 1906 – December 16, 1935) was an American actress. Appearing in about 120 pictures between 1926 and 1935, she is best remembered for her comedic roles in films like Marx Brothers' Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, a number of Charley Chase's short comedies, and co-starring with Buster Keaton and Jimmy Durante in Speak Easily. She also had roles in several Laurel and Hardy films, the last of which (The Bohemian Girl) featured her in a part that was truncated by her death. Early life Todd was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts to Jim and Bertha Todd, and was a bright student who achieved good academic results. She intended to become a school tea…

Miriam Cooper (November 7, 1891 – April 12, 1976) was a silent film actress who is best known for her work in early film including Birth of a Nation and Intolerance for D.W. Griffith and The Honor System and Evangeline for her husband Raoul Walsh. She retired from acting in 1923 but was rediscovered by the film community in the 1960s, and toured colleges lecturing about silent films. Early life Miriam Cooper was born to Julian Cooper and Margaret Stewart in Baltimore, Maryland on November 7, 1891. Her mother was from a devout Catholic family with a long history in Baltimore. Her paternal grandfather had helped discover Navassa Island and made his wealth from selling gua…

Ruth Chatterton (December 24, 1892 – November 24, 1961) was an American actress and novelist. She also flew planes and knew Amelia Earhart. Early life Born in New York City on Christmas Eve 1892, of English and French extraction to Walter Smith and Lillian Reed Chatterton. She was a descendant of the English poet Thomas Chatterton. She was on Broadway by the age of 14, as a dancer. Career After leaving a private school at the age of 14, Ruth started off as a chorus girl in a stage play and was a star on the American stage by age eighteen. Her first film was Sins of the Fathers in 1928, and almost all of her films were pre-Code. She was nominated for the Academy Awar…

June Caprice (November 19, 1895 – November 9, 1936) was an American silent film actress. Early life and career Born Helen Elizabeth Lawson in Arlington, Massachusetts, she began her acting career in live theatre and in 1916 signed with the Fox Film Corporation. In 1916 William Fox searched to find a "second Mary Pickford." By the summer of that year he believed he had located the woman he predicted would be the best known female on the screen within six months time. She made her debut on July 9 at the Academy of Music (Manhattan) on 14th Street (Manhattan), in Caprice of the Mountains. A New York Times film critic said of her, "she is young, pretty, graceful, petite, …

Agnes Ayres (April 4, 1898 – December 25, 1940) was an American actress who rose to fame during the silent film era. Early life and career Born as Agnes Eyre Henkel in Carbondale, Illinois, she began her career in 1914 when she was noticed by an Essanay Studios staff director and cast as an extra in a crowd scene. After moving to New York City with her mother to pursue a career in acting, Ayres was spotted by actress Alice Joyce. Joyce noticed the physical resemblance the two shared which eventually led to Ayres being cast in Richard the Brazen (1917), as Joyce's character's sister. Ayres' career began to gain momentum when Paramount Pictures founder Jesse Laksy began …

Nejla Ates was a Turkish belly dancer and actress born on march 7, 1932 in Romania as Necla Batirin. Notably, she appeared the film Son of Sinbad and Fanny, her first Broadway musical in 1954. She also performed at many clubs. In January of 1963, she married producer Francis Elwood Semone. They divorced in March 1964. She also married writer Ozer Bayscurlins until her death. She tried to commit suicide twice by overdosing on pills. She died in Istanbul, Turkey in April of 2005 There is a statue of her in Central Park.

Gwili Andre (4 February 1908 – 5 February 1959) was a Danish actress who had a brief career in Hollywood films. Film career Born Gurli Andresen in Copenhagen, Denmark, Andre came to Hollywood in the early 1930s with the intention of establishing herself as a film star. She appeared in the 1932 RKO Studio films Roar of the Dragon and Secrets of the French Police and began to attract attention for her striking good looks. These films provided her with starring roles playing against such established actors as Richard Dix, ZaSu Pitts and Frank Morgan, and RKO began using her glamorous looks to promote her. A widespread publicity campaign ensured that her name and face beca…

Ruth "Dusty" Anderson (December 17, 1918 in Toledo, Ohio) is an American actress and World War II pin-up girl. She began her career as a model and made her motion picture debut in a minor role as one of the cover girls in the 1944 Columbia Pictures production of Cover Girl starring Rita Hayworth. Over the next three years Anderson appeared in another eight films, usually in secondary roles. During World War II she was one of a number of actresses who became a pin-up girl, appearing in the October 27, 1944 issue of the United States Military's YANK magazine. Dusty Anderson married director Jean Negulesco in 1946 and retired from acting. Four years later, her final scree…

Merry Anders (born Mary Helen Anderson; 22 May 1932) is an American supporting actress who has appeared in a number of television programs and films since the 1950s. In 1954, she succeeded Ann Todd as Stuart Erwin's daughter in the final season of his TV series, The Stu Erwin Show. From 1957-1959, Anders co-starred with Barbara Eden and Lori Nelson in How to Marry a Millionaire in a syndicated 20th Century Fox television series based on the 1953 film How to Marry a Millionaire. The three played young women living in New York City trying to land a wealthy husband. Anders left show business in 1972 to work for a division of Litton Industries, where she stayed until her ret…

Adrienne Ames (August 3, 1907 – May 31, 1947) was an American film actress. Life and career Born Adrienne Ruth McClure in Fort Worth, Texas, Ames began her film career in 1927 as a stand-in for Pola Negri. Ames was soon cast in small film roles in silent films. With the advent of talking pictures, Ames' popularity grew and she was usually cast as society women, or in musicals. She made thirty films during the 1930s with her biggest success in George White's Scandals (1934), a film which was also notable as the debut of Alice Faye. Ames also appeared with the three leading men from the 1931 version of Dracula (Bela Lugosi, David Manners, and Edward Van Sloan) in The Dea…

Chelo Alonso (born April 10, 1933) is a former Cuban actress who became a star in Italian cinema, and ultimately a 1960s cult film heroine and sex symbol in the U.S. She was well-known for playing femme fatales with fiery tempers and sensual dance scenes. Biography Alonso was born Isabella Garcia in Central Lugareño, Camagüey, Cuba, to a Cuban father and Mexican mother. She initially achieved recognition in Cuba for her dancing ability, becoming a sensation at Cuba's National Theatre in Havana. Soon after, she emerged as a new exotic dancing talent at the Folies Bergère in Paris. She was billed as the "new Josephine Baker", who had also performed and become famous at …

Lola Jean Albright (born July 20, 1924, Akron, Ohio) is an American singer and actress. Albright worked as a model before moving to Hollywood. She began her motion picture with a bit part in the 1948 film The Pirate, and followed it with important role in the acclaimed 1949 hit Champion. For the next ten years, she appeared in secondary roles in over twenty films, including several 'B' Westerns. Albright also acted in guest roles on several television series. In 1958, she gained the part of Edie Hart in the trend-setting Peter Gunn, a television detective series produced by Blake Edwards and directed by Robert Altman, with the theme music that made Henry Mancini famous.…

Anna Maria Alberghetti (born 15 May 1936) is an Italian-born operatic singer and actress. Born in Pesaro (Marche) she starred on Broadway and won a Tony Award in 1962 as Best Actress (Musical) for Carnival![1] (she tied with Diahann Carroll for the musical No Strings). Alberghetti was a child prodigy. Her father was an opera singer and concert master of the Rome Opera Company. Her mother was a pianist. At age 6, Anna Maria sang in a concert on the Isle of Rhodes with a 100-piece orchestra. She performed at Carnegie Hall in New York at the age of 13. She also entered into film as a teenager. Her cinema appearances include The Medium (1951), Here Comes the Groom (1951), …

Dawn Addams (21 September 1930 – 7 May 1985) was a British actress in motion pictures of the 1950s. She was born Victoria Dawn Addams in Felixstowe, Suffolk, England, the daughter of Ethel Mary and Captain James Ramage Addams. Her mother died when she was young, and she spent her early life in Calcutta, India. Her heart shaped face and beautiful physique soon attracted the attention of talent agents. She resembled another British actress Elizabeth Taylor but only slightly. Addams unlike Taylor retained her British accent. Her film career began in 1951, and a year later she co-starred with Peter Lawford in The Hour of 13. In 1953 she appeared in a small role in the groun…