10 silent film stars who rocked Hollywood

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Today, the silent film era seems naive and downright charming. The villains famously twisted the tips of their mustaches, the ladies always got into trouble, but at the last moment they were always saved by a handsome hero. Even the vagabonds seemed quirky and romantic. Behind the scenes, however, the burgeoning film industry was decadent and at times overly free-spirited.

The movie stars of the day were making fantastic amounts of money and wasting it, including on booze and drugs. The studios went out of their way to keep scandals out of the press. The advertising departments were constantly working on this, which were faced with the task of not only advertising films, but also protecting the reputation of the stars. Considering the antics of famous actors, they had a lot of work.

1. William Desmond Taylor

At the height of the silent film era, William Desmond Taylor was the big shot. The famous film director made 60 films and played himself at 27. But on February 1, 1922, he was shot with a revolver. The ensuing scandal nearly razed the fledgling film industry to the ground. Taylor was shot in his home. There were no signs of burglary, and cash was found on the body and in the house. This ruled out the burglary version. Interestingly, death was reported only 12 hours after the body was found.

When the police arrived, they found the studio bosses frantically burning Taylor's papers. Witnesses said that movie star Mabel Normand was with him that evening and was immediately suspected. Immediately there were a huge number of rumors about the lifestyle of both Taylor and Normand, including drug trafficking, sexual perversion and even Satanism. Even the wildest rumors were fueled by Taylor's mysterious past, not least by the fact that his name was not actually Taylor at all, but William Cunningham Dean-Tanner.

When the press learned that he had a wife and child, whom he abandoned in 1908, it only added fire to the fire. The police had a long list of suspects, and moreover, about 300 people themselves came to the station and confessed to the murder, despite the fact that they never even met Taylor. Mabel Normand was one of the prime suspects, and this completely ruined her career.

2. Barbara La Marr

Barbara La Marr was nicknamed "the girl who was too beautiful." Her life has always been colorful and eventful. For example, Barbara was kidnapped by her own sister. The star of 27 silent films such as The Three Musketeers and Prisoner of Zenda, La Marr has even written several of her own movie scripts. However, such a tremendous social success did not extend to her personal life.

Barbara was married at least four times and had a son, whose existence she kept a secret. She claimed she only slept two hours a day. There were rumors of her drug addiction and fancy diets during her insomnia. La Marr, despite her beauty, gradually began to become less and less in demand in the studio, but continued to work, despite the fact that she despaired of regaining her popularity.

Even tuberculosis, complicated by an addiction to drugs and alcohol, could not stop her from working … until she just collapsed right on the set. Barbara died a few months later at the age of 29.

3. Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin was probably the brightest star of the bit cinema era and is still adored by many people today. His vagabond character is one of the longest-lived in Hollywood history. Success brought Charlie Chaplin such wealth that he could only dream of during his half-impoverished childhood. He turned out not only to have acting talent, but also the ability for business: Chaplin created his own studio, becoming rich and having the opportunity to act in what he liked.

However, with Chaplin's personal life, everything was much more complicated. He has been married several times and is facing a paternity lawsuit. He even bribed a doctor (in the amount of $ 25,000, which was a huge amount of money at the time) to make false entries on the birth certificate of one of his children. Moreover, the actor is known to have had numerous relationships with underage women.

In 1947, Chaplin was declared a communist at all, after which his star began to rapidly lurch towards decline. After a trip to London, he was denied permission to return to the country. Knowing that he would have to explain his political views and private life, Chaplin chose not to return and move to Switzerland. It was a sad end to a famous career.

4. Olive Thomas

Olive Thomas began her career as a model artist and later as a dancer. She received her first film contract in 1916 and soon met and married actor Jack Pickford. The couple seemed to be leading a glamorous life, but in reality, things were not so good. In September 1920, Thomas and Pickford went on their second honeymoon to Paris. And they said that it was too stormy with them. Returning from another party to her room at the Ritz, Olive, for unknown reasons, swallowed an entire bottle of liquid bichloride mercury, a toxic drug Pickford had been prescribed to treat his chronic syphilis. Despite attempts to revive her, Olive Thomas died shortly thereafter. She was 25 years old.

5. Thomas Ince

Thomas Ince was the world's first movie mogul. He set up the first film studio and later helped found Paramount Pictures. In 1924, Thomas came close to bankruptcy and began negotiating a deal with newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hirst. On November 16, he visited Hirst on his yacht with Charlie Chaplin and Hirst's mistress Marion Davis (whom Hirst suspected of having a Chaplin connection). On board the yacht, the guests celebrated Ince's 44th birthday. What happened after that is unclear.

The director was taken from the yacht to the hospital, where he died a few days later. The fact that his body was immediately cremated increased suspicions that "something was amiss." The main theories as to what happened included accidental poisoning, accidental shooting, and premeditated murder. Ince's death certificate listed heart failure as the cause of death, but newspapers announced that he had been shot. The secretary aboard the yacht claimed to have seen Ince bleeding, and Hirst was suspected of either the premeditated murder of Thomas Ince or the attempted murder of Charlie Chaplin, which led to Ince being accidentally shot.

It is worth noting that there were some attempts to hush up this case. Chaplin denied being on the yacht, and Ince's wife was sent on a surprise trip to Europe after meeting Hirst. Hirst offered her a trust, and other guests on the boat were given similar incentives to keep their mouths shut. In another unexpected turn of events, one of the maintenance girls claimed that Ince had raped her aboard the yacht.

This could be considered a fantasy if she had not given birth to a child nine months later, after which she immediately died in a car accident near Hirst's house. She was allegedly found by Hirst's bodyguards, and the girl had an incredible suicide note. The child was sent to an orphanage under the patronage of mistress Hirst.

6. Jewel Carmen

Jewel Carmen was an actress at Keystone Studios. Although she was undeniably talented, this all outweighed the actress's irrelevance. Jewell had a long-standing legal dispute with Fox Film Corporation, with which she was trying to terminate her contract. She even started working for Keystone, while being bound by Fox.

Legal proceedings led to Jewel disappearing from the screens for 3 years, which essentially buried her career. She married director Roland West in 1918, but they divorced in the 1920s. West had an affair with actress Thelma Todd, who lived in a nearby apartment. In December 1935, Todd was found dead in her garage after breathing carbon monoxide.

Although Carmen and West had long been divorced, she was summoned to court to testify about her husband's relationship with Todd. In court, Carmen testified that she saw Thelma Todd on the night of her death, when she was traveling in a car with a "suspicious-looking man." After the scandal, her career never recovered, and Carmen died in obscurity in 1984. Nobody even noticed this.

7. Rudolph Valentino

Rudolph Valentino, "Latin Lover", began his working life as a tango dancer, dancing with wealthy women. His gigolo career ended abruptly after a scandal involving a lawsuit, a murder charge and the threat of imprisonment. He changed his name and moved to California, where he began acting in films. In 1921, Valentino starred in the film Sheikh, in which he portrayed the fatal lover. This was the image with which Valentino subsequently began to always be associated. Further scandals followed, mostly involving women.

In 1922, he married a second time without divorcing his first wife, and was accused of bigamy. Valentino was very sensitive to innuendo about his sexual orientation from men who, in his opinion, were jealous of his success with women. On one occasion, he got into a fight with a journalist whose headline in the Chicago Tribune did not appeal to him. And a couple of weeks later, he fell to the floor in his hotel with a ruptured appendix. He also developed pleurisy in his lung.

On August 23, 1926, Valentino died a few hours after falling into a coma. He was only 31 years old. More than 100,000 people lined the streets for his funeral, and several fans reportedly committed suicide due to grief.

8. Alma Rubens

Today, Alma Rubens is little remembered as an actress, although she appeared in nearly 60 films, including Renegades, which featured a woman tortured by drug addiction. By the mid-1920s, Rubens had developed a heavy addiction to morphine and cocaine and was replaced in Torrent by newcomer Greta Garbo. Rubens earned huge royalties for her films, most of which she spent on drugs.

She had several police reports and was treated in a mental hospital to try to get rid of her addiction. Rubens also had three short marriages. In 1931, she wrote a story about her life entitled Why I Remain Doping, and she died shortly after its publication at the age of 33.

9. Gloria Swanson

Gloria Swanson was one of the brightest stars of the silent film era. Her life is as exciting as any of her films. Gloria started her own production company, and she was one of the few movie stars of her time to sign a contract worth seven zeros. And yet she fell victim to the studio system.

In 1925, Swanson directed Madame Sans Jean, one of the first films made by American filmmakers overseas. While working on the ribbon, she fell in love with the French marquis, although she was still married to her second husband. She became pregnant by the marquis. Since her contract had a morale clause and could be banned from working if she was found pregnant, Swanson decided to have an abortion that nearly killed her. She kept her pregnancy a secret from everyone for the sake of her career.

Her personal life continued to be a mess (she married and divorced six times), so Swanson tried to focus on her production company. However, her inexperience in choosing business partners brought Gloria to the brink of bankruptcy, and her career began to decline.

10. Roscoe Arbuckle

Roscoe Arbuckle's trial is probably one of the most scandalous moments in Hollywood history, not only because of the death of a young woman, but also from the scene of debauchery that caused her to die. He was charged with the murder of Virginia Rapp by "excessive pressure" on her during forced intercourse. Medical records showed that Miss Rapp died of peritonitis, but the prosecution insisted that Arbukle tore her internal organs while lying on her, because he was incredibly fat.

Rapp was usually portrayed in the press as an innocent girl, despite the fact that she was known to have a habit of getting drunk in the trash, after which she behaved very strangely (for example, she repeatedly ripped her clothes at parties). Shortly before her death, she had an illegal abortion, which did not go without consequences and may have affected peritonitis and bladder rupture. Although Roscoe was eventually acquitted, the revelations during the trial were too shocking and Roscoe's career as a movie star was over.