Profile of Blanche Sweet on Famous Like Me

Blanche Sweet (June 18, 1895 - September 6, 1986) was a silent film actress who began her career in the earliest days of the Hollywood motion picture film industry.

Born Sarah Blanche Sweet in Chicago, Illinois into a family of stock theater and vaudeville performers, Blanche Sweet entered the entertainment industry at an early age. In 1909, at the age of fourteen she entered the nascent American motion picture industry when she started work at Biograph studios under contract to director D. W. Griffith. Her first starring role was in the 1911 Griffith film The Lonedale Operator. In 1913 she secured a place in film history by starring in the first American full-length feature Judith of Bethulia, which was also directed by Griffith. In 1915 Sweet was initially cast by Griffith in the part of Elsie Stoneman in his colossal epic The Birth of a Nation but the role was eventually given to rival teenaged actress Lillian Gish. That same year Sweet left Biograph and parted ways with her collaborative work with Griffith.

Throughout the 1910s Blanche Sweet continued her career appearing in a number of highly prominent roles in films and remained a publicly popular leading lady. Sweet often starred in vehicles by notable directors Cecil B. DeMille and Marshall Neilan. It was during her career working with Neilan that the two began a publicized affair and they married in 1922. The union ended in 1933 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. As the Roaring Twenties wound down, Sweet's career began to falter. As the era of the talkie came into fashion, Blanche Sweet found herself in a similar position of many of her silent film contemporaries; her popularity as a film actress waned in favor of a new crop of performers heavily promoted by the film industry for the new era of sound films. Sweet made just three talking pictures, including her critically lauded performance in the 1930 Show Girl in Hollywood before retiring from the screen that same year and marrying stage actor Raymond Hackett in 1936. The marriage lasted until Hackett's death in 1958.

Blanche Sweet spent the remainder of her performing career in radio and in secondary Broadway stage roles. Eventually, when her career in both of these fields petered out 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 long overdue recognition as a pioneering film actress of American cinema. She died on September 6, 1986 New York City, New York of a stroke.

External Links

• Blanche Sweet at the Internet Movie Database

• Blache Sweet at Golden Silents

• Blanche Sweet at Unsung Divas of the SIlent Screen

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