Blanche Sweet
From Wikipedia
Sarah Blanche Sweet (June 18, 1896 – September 6, 1986) was an American silent film actress who began her career in the earliest days of the Hollywood motion picture film industry.
Sweet is renowned for her energetic, independent roles, at variance with the 'ideal' Griffith type of vulnerable, often fragile, femininity. After many starring roles, her first real landmark film was the 1911 Griffith thriller The Lonedale Operator. In 1913 she starred in Griffith's first feature-length movie, Judith of Bethulia. In 1914 Sweet was initially cast by Griffith in the part of Elsie Stoneman in his epic The Birth of a Nation but the role was eventually given to rival actress Lillian Gish, who was Sweet's senior by three years. That same year Sweet parted ways with Griffith and joined Paramount (then Famous Players-Lasky) for the much higher pay that studio was able to afford.
Throughout the 1910s, Sweet continued her career appearing in a number of highly prominent roles in films and remained a publicly popular leading lady. She often starred in vehicles by Cecil B. DeMille and Marshall Neilan, and she was recognised by leading film critics of the time to be one of the foremost actresses of the entire silent era. It was during her time working with Neilan that the two began a publicized affair, which brought on his divorce from former actress Gertrude Bambrick. Sweet and Neilan married in 1922. The union ended in 1929 with Sweet charging that Neilan was a persistent adulterer.
During the early 1920s Sweet's career continued to prosper, and she starred in the first film version of Anna Christie in 1923. The film is also notable as being the first Eugene O'Neill play to be made into a motion picture. In successive years, she starred in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Sporting Venus, both directed by Neilan. Sweet soon began a new career phase as one of the newly formed MGM studio's biggest stars.
Sweet made just three talking pictures, including her critically lauded performance in 1930's Show Girl in Hollywood, before retiring from the screen that same year and marrying stage actor Raymond Hackett in 1935. The marriage lasted until Hackett's death in 1958.
Sweet spent the remainder of her performing career in radio and in secondary Broadway stage roles. Eventually, her career in both of these fields petered out, and she began working in a Los Angeles department store. In the late 1960s, her acting legacy was resurrected when film scholars invited her to Europe to receive recognition for her work.
On September 24, 1984, a tribute to Blanche Sweet was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Miss Sweet introduced her 1925 film, The Sporting Venus.
Sweet died in New York City of a stroke, on September 6, 1986, just weeks after her 90th birthday.
Known for
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
The Massacre
Stephen's Ward
Souls for Sale
Self - Celebrity Actress (uncredited)
A Corner in Wheat
The Sowers
Karin Dolokhof
To Save Her Soul
Stage Dancer
Anna Christie
Anna Christie
Broken Ways
The Road Agent's Wife
The Battle
The Boy's Sweetheart
The Odalisque
May, a Stock Girl
The Captive
Sonya Matinovich
A Temporary Truce
Alice Hardy - the Prospector's Wife
The Thin Man
For His Son
The Son's Fiancée
The Long Road
Edith
The Voice of the Child
The Wife
The Far Cry
The Case of Becky
Dorothy/Becky
Quincy Adams Sawyer
Alice Pettengill
The Rocky Road
The Making of a Man
Young Woman
Near To Earth
A Flash of Light
Classmates
Sylvia Randolph
Under Burning Skies
Emily
The Avenging Conscience
The Sweetheart
The Silver Horde
Queenie
If We Only Knew
The Mother
The Miser's Heart
Neighbor
Twenty Years After
(archive footage)
The Last Drop of Water
Mary
Two Men of the Desert
The Authoress
Pirate Gold
The Daughter
The Lonedale Operator
Daughter of the Lonedale Operator
In the Palace of the King
Dolores Mendoza
The Day After
The New Year
Home, Sweet Home
The Wife
Why Women Love
Molla Hansen
The Primal Call
The Woman in White
Laura Fairlie / Anne Catherick
The Painted Lady
The Older Sister
The Lesser Evil
The Young Woman
His Daughter
The Secret Sin
Edith Martin / Grace Martin
Her Awakening
Mary
The Hushed Hour
Virginia Appleton Blodgett
Love in an Apartment Hotel
The Young Woman
Blind Love
The Young Woman
Singed
Dolly Wall
Strongheart
Dorothy Nelson, Frank's Sister
The Sporting Venus
Lady Gwendolyn
All on Account of the Milk
The Maid
The Ragamuffin
Jenny
His Supreme Moment
Carla King
Through Darkening Vales
Grace
Hollywood
Self
Three Friends
The Wife
Death's Marathon
The Wife
A Sailor’s Heart
The Sailor's Second Sweetheart
Show Girl in Hollywood
Donny Harris
The Storm
Natalie Raydon
Love in the Hills
The Mountain Girl
The Coming of Angelo
Theresa
Judith of Bethulia
Judith
The Eternal Mother
Martha, the Wife
The Hero of Little Italy
Maria
A Chance Deception
The Wife
Men and Women
Agnes Rodman - Stephen's Daughter
Girl in the Web
Esther Maitland
The House of Discord
The Wife
Make Mine Memories
Oil and Water
Mlle. Genova
A Country Cupid
Edith
A Woman of Pleasure
Alice Dane
The Evil Eye
Dr. Katherine Torrance
The Transformation of Mike
The Tenement Girl
A Woman Scorned
The Stolen Bride
The Grower's Daughter
Those Who Dance
Rose Carney
With the Enemy's Help
The Prospector's Wife
The Tear That Burned
Meg - the Wild Girl
Those Without Sin
Melanie Landry
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Teresa "Tess" Durbeyfield
A Cure for Suffragettes
Before the Nickelodeon: The Cinema of Edwin S. Porter
Narrator (voice)
The Second Mrs. Roebuck
Mabel Mack
The Little Country Mouse
Dorothy
The Painted Lady
Jane - the Elder Sister
Her Unwilling Husband
Mavis
The Unpardonable Sin
Alice Parcot / Dinny Parcot
The Deadlier Sex
Mary Willard
The Woman Racket
Julia Barnes Hayes
Fighting Blood
For Her Father's Sins
Mary Ashton
Diplomacy
Dora Weymouth
The Chief's Blanket
The Young Woman
Stolen Goods
Margery Huntley
That Girl Montana
Montana Rivers
The Warrens of Virginia
Agatha Warren
The Goddess of Sagebrush Gulch
The Goddess
Enoch Arden
Woman on the Beach
The God Within
The Woman of the Camp
Enoch Arden: Part I
The Clue
Christine Lesley
The Thousand-Dollar Husband
Olga Nelson
One Is Business, the Other Crime
Rich Wife
Always Faithful
Mrs. George W. Mason
The New Commandment
Renee Darcourt
Bluebeard's Seven Wives
Juliet
The Villain Foiled
Miss Page
A String of Pearls
The Brother's Sweetheart
The Meanest Man in the World
Jane Hudson
Fighting Cressy
Cressy
The Secret Orchard
Diane
Simple Souls
Molly Shine
Help Wanted - Male
Leona Stafford