Marie Prevost was a Canadian-born actress of the early days of cinema. During her twenty year career, she made 121 silent and talking pictures.

Born Mary Bickford Dunn in Sarnia, Ontario, she was still a child her family moved first to Denver, Colorado and then later to Los Angeles. While working as a secretary, she applied for and obtained an acting job at the Hollywood studio owned by Mack Sennett. Sennett, who was from a small town outside of Montreal, dubbed her as the exotic “French girl”, adding Dunn to his collection of bathing beauties under the stage name of Marie Prevost.

In 1919, Prevost secretly married socialite Sonny Gerke who left her after six months of marriage. Gerke’s mother had forbidden him to associate with Prevost because she was an actress, so he was scared to tell his mother of the marriage?and he couldn’t get a divorce without revealing that he was married. Prevost, fearful of the bad publicity a divorce would cause, would stay secretly married to Gerke until 1923.

One of her first publicly successful film roles came in the 1920 romantic film Love, Honor, and Behave, opposite another newcomer and Sennett protegé, George O’Hara. Initially cast in numerous minor comedic roles as the sexy, innocent young girl, she worked in several films for Sennett’s studio until 1921 when she signed with Universal. At Universal, Irving Thalberg took an interest in Prevost and decided to make her a star. Thalberg ensured that she received a great deal of publicity and staged numerous publicity events. After announcing that he had selected two films for Prevost to star in, The Moonlight Follies and Kissed, Thalberg sent Prevost to Coney Island where she publicly burned her bathing suit to symbolize the end of her bathing beauty days.

Marie Windsor. Born as Emily Marie Bertelson in Marysvale, Piute County, Utah, Windsor was an actress known as “The Queen of the Bs” because she appeared in so many film noirs and B-movies like Cat-Women of the Moon. However, other actresses, such as Fay Wray, Lucille Ball, and others have garnered the title as well.

Windsor, a former Miss Utah, trained for the stage under Maria Ouspenskaya, and after several years as a telephone operator, a stage and radio actress, and a bit and extra player in films, she began playing feature and lead parts in 1947.

The 5’9″ actress’s first memorable role was opposite John Garfield in Force of Evil playing seductress Edna Tucker. Windsor also had large roles in film noirs including The Sniper, The Narrow Margin, City That Never Sleeps and Stanley Kubrick’s heist movie The Killing playing Elisha Cook Jr.’s scheming wife.

Later she moved on to television, appearing on such shows as Maverick, Bat Masterson, The Incredible Hulk, General Hospital, Murder, She Wrote, Rawhide, and Salem’s Lot.

Marilyn Miller was one of the most popular Broadway musical stars of the 1920s and early 1930s. She was an accomplished tap dancer, singer and actress, but it was the combination of these talents that endeared her to audiences. On stage she usually played rags-to-riches Cinderella characters who lived happily ever after. By contrast her personal life was marked by tragedy and illness, ending in her death at age 37.

She was born Mary Ellen Reynolds in Evansville, Indiana, the youngest daughter of Edwin D. Reynolds, a telephone lineman, and his first wife, the former Ada Lynn Thompson. The tiny, delicate-featured blonde beauty was only four years old when, as “Mademoiselle Sugarlump,” she debuted at Lakeside Park in Dayton, Ohio as a member of her family’s vaudeville act, the Columbian Trio, which then included Marilyn’s step-father, Oscar Caro Miller, and two older sisters, Ruth and Claire. They were re-christened the Five Columbians after Marilyn and her mother joined the routine. From their home base in Findlay, Ohio, they toured the Midwest and Europe in variety for ten years, skirting the child labor authorities, before Lee Shubert discovered Marilyn at the Lotus Club in London in 1914.

Miller appeared for the Shuberts in the 1914 and 1915 editions of The Passing Show, a Broadway revue at the Winter Garden Theatre, as well as in The Show of Wonders and Fancy Free. But it was Florenz Ziegfeld who made her a star after she performed in his Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, at the famed New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street, with music by Irving Berlin. Sharing billing with Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers and W.C. Fields, she brought the house down with her impersonation of Ziegfeld’s wife, Billie Burke, in a number entitled Mine Was a Marriage of Convenience.

She followed as a headliner in the Follies of 1919, dancing to Berlin’s “Mandy”, and reputedly became Ziegfeld’s mistress, though this was never proven. Miller attained legendary status in the Ziegfeld production Sally with music by Jerome Kern, especially for her performance of Kern’s “Look for the Silver Lining.” The musical, about a dishwasher who joins the Follies and marries a millionaire, ran 570 performances at the New Amsterdam. In 1921, a still-obscure Dorothy Parker memorialized her performance in verse:

Marguerite De La Motte was an American film actress, most notably of the silent film era.

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 Fairbanks, Sr. to play opposite him in swashbuckling adventure films such as 1920’s The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers. She developed a close friendship with Fairbanks and his wife, actress Mary Pickford. De La Motte would also appear opposite such notable actors of the “Roaring Twenties” as Bela Lugosi, Milton Sills, Conrad Nagel, Owen Moore, Lon Chaney, John Gilbert and Noah Beery, Sr.

De La Motte’s career as an actress slowed dramatically at the end of the silent film era of the 1920s. She did continue acting in bit parts through the sound era and made her final appearance in the 1942 film Overland Mail opposite both Noah Beery, Sr. and Noah Beery, Jr., as well as Lon Chaney, Jr.