From Antiquity to the Enlightenment: A History of Western Society, Vol. 3 Book

I discovered this book at a faded movie star's house two years ago. The movie star, who shall remain unnamed, was having a birthday party, and I didn't know anybody there, so I focused on the bookshelf, took down this book, and sat staring at it until I finally forced myself to mingle a little. There's some text, but the book is mostly pictures, as the title says, and I found myself fascinated by all these faces, a few of them photographed in the nineteenth century, so that, wanting to know more about them, I googled a lot of names while reading.



Above, for instance, is the ravishing Renée Adorée. I'd seen her in King Vidor's The Big Parade, though I didn't remember it. She came from a circus family and died of tuberculosis at 35, only a few years after making The Big Parade.



Valda Valkyrien, an Icelandic ballerina who married a Danish nobleman, began her silent-movie career in Denmark, only to move to Hollywood and die there in 1956, long after she retired from acting.



Elmer Clifton appeared in D. W. Griffith's landmark The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, and soon moved to the other side of the camera, second-unit directing on Griffith's Way Down East and performing some of the perilous stunts in that movie's famous "rescue on the ice" sequence. Clifton's directing career was derailed when the star of The Warrens of Virginia, a film he was shooting in Texas, was badly burned on the set and died. Clifton wasn't at fault, but his career never fully recovered.



Antonio Moreno's career began to falter with the advent of the talkies, due to his heavy Spanish accent. He moved to Mexico, where, like Elmer Clifton, he began a directing career, and later established himself as a Hollywood character actor, with parts in The Creature from the Black Lagoon and John Ford's The Searchers.



Blanche Sweet's career also faltered when the talkies were born. She made just three sound movies and moved on to stage and radio work. When that, too, dried up, she worked in a department store. She died at 90 in New York City.



Matty Kemp died at 92 in Los Angeles. His career began in 1926, the year before the first talkie, and he continued to act in small parts until the forties. Then he switched gears, becoming a producer and working as an executive for Mary Pickford's production company.



Vivian Martin left movies in 1921 and returned to her first love, the stage. Like Matty Kemp and Blanche Sweet, she lived a long life, dying at 93 in New York City, where she was a benefactress to young performers.

None of these stories can be found in A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen, but the faces can be, and there are many more, no less photogenic, awaiting rediscovery.