Renée Adorée

 Renée Adorée (September 30, 1898 – October 5, 1933)

She was the daughter of circus artists and by age five was performing with her parents. Having made a reputation in England and Australia for her dancing skills, she went to New York City very early in 1919, where she was cast in a vaudeville-style musical called Oh, Uncle, which opened at the Garrick Theatre in Washington, D.C. in March 1919; by mid March, it was being staged in Trenton, New Jersey, and subsequently toured through the summer. In July, it was renamed Oh, What a Girl! and opened at the Shubert Theatre in New York City. Over the next several months, she toured in The Dancer, another Shubert production. By January 1920, the opportunity arose for her to work in the motion picture business when she was cast in The Strongest, a dramatic photoplay written by Georges Clemenceau, France's celebrated prime minister. She is most famous for her role as Melisande in the melodramatic romance and war epic The Big Parade (1925) opposite John Gilbert. It became one of MGM's all-time biggest hits and a film that historians rank as one of the best of the silent film era. In The Mating Call, a 1928 film produced by Howard Hughes, Adorée had a very brief swimming scene in the nude that caused a significant commotion at the time. With the advent of sound in film, Adorée was one of the fortunate stars whose voices met the film industry's new needs. She starred with Lon Chaney and her former brother-in-law Owen Moore, made three more films with John Gilbert, and appeared in four films with leading Hollywood actor Ramón Novarro. By the end of 1930, Adorée had appeared in 45 films, the last four of them were sound pictures. That year, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and lived only a few years longer. Adorée went against her physician's advice by finishing her final film Call of the Flesh with Ramon Novarro. At its completion, she was rushed to a sanitarium in Prescott, Arizona, where she lay flat on her back for two years in an effort to regain her physical health. In April 1933, she left the sanitarium. At this point, it was thought she had recovered sufficiently to resume her screen career, but she swiftly weakened and her health declined day by day. She was moved from her modest home in the Tujunga Hills to the Sunland health resort in September 1933. Adorée died there on October 5, 1933 in Tujunga, California. She is interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.