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Mildred Harris

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Mildred Harris
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Mildred Harris

Mildred Harris (November 29, 1901 - July 20, 1944) was a notable actress of the silent film era.





Contents





Early life

Born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Mildred Harris made her first screen appearances at the age of nine then went on to play a variety of juvenile roles in the Oz film series produced by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum.  She was a prominent child actor throughout the 1910s. She eventually graduated to leading lady assignments, working under the direction of such prominent filmmakers as Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith throughout the 1910s. In 1916, at the age of 15, Mildred Harris appeared in Griffith's colossal film epic Intolerance alongside another new teenaged Griffith protégé, Carol Dempster. The two young starlets were cast by Griffith as Babylonian harem girls. Griffith would cast Harris yet again as a harem girl in his 1919 film The Fall of Babylon.



First marriage and scandal

On October 23, 1918 she married actor Charlie Chaplin, a union which caused quite a scandal considering Mildred was sixteen years old and Chaplin was twenty-eight. Mildred gave birth to a male child in 1919, but the child was born extremely deformed and only lived three days. He was buried in the Hollywood Memorial Park cemetery under a headstone with the inscription The Little Mouse. [link]


The marriage lasted until 1920 and the divorce was heavily covered by the press with both Harris and Chaplin making scandalous claims against the other. Chaplin charged that Harris spent nights with noted Ukrainian lesbian film star Alla Nazimova; Harris claimed that Chaplin was abusive and a sexual sadist. 


Cashing in on the failed marriage, producer Louis B. Mayer signed Harris to a series of films billing her as Mildred Harris-Chaplin, an exploitive decision that resulted in a much publicized public fistfight between Mayer and Chaplin on April 8, 1920 at the fashionable Alexendria Hotel in Los Angeles. The altercation ended with actor Jack Pickford escorting a bloodied Chaplin away.


The ensuing publicity certainly helped Mildred's acting career, and 1920's Polly of the Storm Country was a modest success.


After her divorce from Chaplin, Harris had a brief well-publicized relationship with the Prince of Wales, Duke of Windsor (later King Edward VIII for less than a year). [link]



Later career and \"talkies\"




Mildred Harris enjoyed a prolific film career in the 1920s and achieved leading lady status opposite such renowned film actors as: Conrad Nagel, Milton Sills, Lionel Barrymore, Rod La Rocque and the Moore brothers, Owen and Tom. Like so many of her silent screen peers however, Harris found the transition to talkies rather difficult. Among her few memorable roles of the talkie era was her  critically lauded performance in the 1930 film adaptation of the Broadway musical No, No, Nanette, opposite ZaSu Pitts, Louise Fazenda and Lilyan Tashman and her parody of a tempermental and demanding movie starlet (a role she played in real life only several years earlier) in the 1936 Three Stooges comedy, Movie Maniacs. As the 1930s continued however, Harris' career slowed dramatically.


Harris tried for a second act in vaudeville and burlesque, at one point she toured with the comic Phil Silvers. Harris continued to work in film in the early 1940's, largely through the kindness of her former director Cecil B. DeMille, who cast her in bit parts in 1942's Reap the Wild Wind, and 1944's The Story of Dr. Wassell. Her last film appearance was in the 1945 motion picture Having A Wonderful Crime, which was released posthumously. 


In 1944, Mildred Harris died unexpectedly of pneumonia at age 42 and was laid to rest at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. 


For her contribution as an actress in the motion picture industry, Mildred Harris was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6307 Hollywood Blvd. in Los Angeles, California.



Trivia



Mildred Harris filmography



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