The first ever movie star: Florence Lawrence
She was so ill after her injuries that she didn’t return to the screen until 1920. Four years is aeons in the public imagination, and few rushed to witness her efforts. So Lawrence abandoned acting to paint the faces of wannabes, setting up a beauty salon in downtown Los Angeles. For a while, it was a success.
In Kelly R Brown’s 1999 biography of Lawrence, there’s astoundingly modern picture of her, taken around the early Thirties. Her marcelled hair is Harlow-platinum and she clings to her shop’s railings, smiling and squinting in the merciless Californian sun. It seems so jolting a picture of Lawrence given that the majority available are mostly fusty, dusty, pre-1914 film stills of her in floor-length, mutton-sleeved dresses and coils of excessive hair.
A combination of bad marriages, the Wall Street Crash of ’29 and spending follies brought about the demise of her venture and, humiliatingly, she was hired as an extra by MGM in 1936 at $75 a week – an act of charity from a Hollywood behemoth of a studio that she had, in her own small way, helped to create (after all, MGM’s proudest boast was that they had ‘more stars than the heavens’).
By 1938, she was broke, ill with a rare bone marrow disease, forgotten and over fifty (it was a cruelty of the era that women of such an age were considered finished). Just after Christmas of that year, she was heard shouting in pain by one of the women she shared her West Hollywood apartment with: Lawrence had attempted suicide by eating ant paste. She was rushed to hospital, but died soon after. She was interred in an unmarked grave in the Hollywood Cemetery. It remained so until 1991 when Roddy MacDowall paid for a memorial marker: ‘The Biograph Girl’: The First Movie Star.
In 2000, William J. Mann published a novel called The Biograph Girl, a flight of fancy which imagined that Lawrence hadn’t really died in 1938, and was now a feisty, chain-smoking 107-year-old broad. Discovered by a pair of journalist and filmmaker brothers, she ends up making a cameo appearance in a John Waters movie as a leather-clad motorcycle mama.
And so this apparently luckless yet significant figure, has, a century on, had what appears to be the rightful summit of her due. Few, if any of her films survive (none of them, it seems, had any artistic merit anyway – just historical) but her legacy is vast and universal: after all, who, at some point in their lives, has never dreamt of being a movie star?
Category: 1920s and earlier, Vintage news
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Thank you for this informative and interesting post. I’d never heard of Florence Lawrence but I’m intrigued by her. I must go and check out the book as I’d love to see that photograph of her.
Thanks again!
I’d agree its hard for modern viewers to get into ‘flickers’ (those pre 1920 films). Biograph could make some solid product, though I cant lie and say I’d sit down some night to watch them for pure entertainment. Every now and then one will be shown before a feature and I’ll enjoy it, but I dont seek them out.
I’ve seen a handful of Florence’s Biographs. She was very modern, and very sexy on screen (the literal pre Mary Pickford). Hair down she was all sexiness! But I agree the few stills available don’t do much justice. Its like the mystery of Eva Tanguay or Valeska Suratt…not enough in the collective memory to appreciate.
I read both the novel and the bio (with its scary Christian undertones). I wish a new filmography would be done as Im sure more of Florence’s films exist than we realize. Look at Olive Thomas: in 1999 they thought ONE film of hers existed. 12 were found when a comprehensive search was done in 2005. Florence’s story is very sad, but without access to her flickers its even harder to fully grasp.
To whom it may concern,
I have a beautiful autographed photo of Florence Lawrence dated February 17, 1928. This picture is not posted anywhere on the web and I wonder if it has value. It is signed by her and is to “To my dear friends Thelma and Leonard from Florence Lawrence.
Found with the picture is a brochure “Interpreter of Current Plays” with a picture of Thelma Laird Schultheis.
Sandy Simmons