Marian Nixon was an American film actress. Born Marian Nissinen in Superior, Wisconsin, Nixon began her career as a teen working as a chorus dancer on the vaudeville circuit. She began appearing in bit part in films in 1922 and landed her first substantial role in the 1923 film Cupid’s Fireman, opposite Buck Jones. The following year, she was named a WAMPAS Baby Star. Nixon continued to work steadily throughout the mid to late 1920s appearing in Riders of the Purple Sage, Hands Up!, and The Chinese Parrot. In 1929, she made her talkie debut as the lead in Geraldine. Later that same year, Nixon appeared opposite Al Jolson in Say It with Songs followed by General Crack in 1930.

In 1932, she starred as Rebecca in the film adaption of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm with Ralph Bellamy. Following the release of Rebecca, Nixon co-starred in Winner Take All with James Cagney. The next year she had a supporting role in John Ford’s Pilgrimage. In 1934, Nixon attempted to change her wholesome image with a role in the comedy We?re Rich Again. The film wasn’t a success and after appearing in eight more films, Nixon retired from acting in 1936.

On August 11, 1929, Nixon married Chicago department store heir, Edward Hillman, Jr., at the home of his parents. The couple divorced in 1933. The following year, she married her We?re Rich Again director, William A. Seiter. The marriage lasted until Seiter’s death in 1964. In 1974, married actor/producer Ben Lyon. After Lyon’s death in 1979, Nixon never remarried.

On February 13, 1983, Nixon died of complications following open heart surgery at the age of 78. She is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

Marie Doro was an American stage and film actress of the early silent film era.

Marie Doro was born as Marie Katherine Steward in Duncannon, Pennsylvania and began her career as a theater actress before progressing to motion pictures in 1915, under contract with film producer Adolph Zukor.

She was briefly married to the vaudeville and silent screen actor Elliott Dexter; the marriage soon ended in divorce. The marriage produced no children and Doro never remarried. Her name was linked over the years to much older William Gillette, of Sherlock Holmes fame, who was probably infatuated with her.

Doro’s film debut for Zukor’s Famous Players studio was the starring role in the now lost short film The Morals of Marcus in 1915.

Marie Dressler was a Canadian actress and Depression-era film star. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1932 in Min and Bill.

Born Leila Marie Koerber in Cobourg, Ontario, to parents Alexander Rudolph Koerber and Anna Henderson, the young Dressler was able to hone her talents to make people laugh, and began her acting career when she was fourteen. In 1892 she made her debut on Broadway. At first she hoped to make a career of singing light opera, but then gravitated to vaudeville. In vaudeville she was known for her full-figured body?fashionable at the time?and had buxom contemporaries such as her friends Lillian Russell, Fay Templeton, May Irwin and Trixie Friganza. She used the services of ‘body sculptor to the stars’ Sylvia of Hollywood to keep herself at a steady weight.

She appeared in a play called Robber of the Rhine which was written by Maurice Barrymore. Barrymore gave Dressler some positive advice about furthering her career and she later acknowledged his help. Years later she would appear with his sons, Lionel and John, in motion pictures. During the early 1900s, she became a major vaudeville star, although she had appeared on stage in New York City earlier, for example, in 1492 Up To Date. In 1902, she met fellow Canadian Mack Sennett and helped him get a job in the theater. In addition to her stage work, Dressler recorded for Edison Records in 1909 and 1910.

Dressler’s first role in a film was in 1910, when she was 42. After Sennett became the owner of his namesake motion picture studio, he convinced Dressler to star in his highly successful 1914 silent film Tillie’s Punctured Romance, opposite Sennett?s newly discovered actor, Charlie Chaplin. Dressler appeared in two more “Tillie” sequels and other comedies until 1918, when she returned to vaudeville.

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: