Helen Chandler

 Helen Chandler, 1904-1965, was a popular New York stage actress who, after making two 1927 silent movies, began a film career in 1929 with the emergence of talkies. After one at Pathe and two at Fox she was cast with Leslie Howard and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in Warner Brothers' "Outward Bound" along with Beryl Mercer, Dudley Digges, Montagu Love, and Alison Skipworth. Although it wasn't box office, it was a critical success. "Mother's Cry", a weepie followed with Dorothy Peterson. David Manners, Edward Woods and Evalyn Knapp. Universal's "Dracula", produced and directed by Tod Browning, starring Bela Lugosi, David Manners, and Dwight Frye, is Chandler's best known film. She had success at Warner Brothers with"The Last Flight" starring Richard Barthelmess, "A House Divided" with Walter Huston and Douglass Montgomery, as second lead in Katharine Hepburn's "Christopher Strong" at RKO, in a supporting role in "Goodbye Again" with Warren William, Joan Blondell, and Genevieve Tobin, and as second female lead again in "Midnight Alibi" with Richard Barthelmess and Ann Dvorak. She left Warner Brothers in 1934 and freelanced, but was disatisfied with the results, and returned to live theater in 1938. Presumably, Chandler felt she deserved to be thought of as the next Lillian Gish but her grandiose dreams didn't come to fruitation in films or in theater and now her alcohol and drug use impinged upon her theatrical success. In 1940 she was committed to a sanitarium and ten years later, she was disfigured by a fire caused by smoking in bed. Chandler had been married to screenwriter Cyril Hume (1930-1934), and then to actor Bramwell Fletcher (1935-1941), and there was a third marriage to merchant seaman Walter Plascik who she met at a bar. He shipped out to sea and the marriage was soon over although the union wasn't officially annulled. After surgery for a bleeding ulcer, Chandler died on April 30, 1965 in Hollywood at age 59. She was cremated but no relative collected her ashes which still remain at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles.