Mary Brian (born Louise Byrdie Dantzler,[1] February 17, 1906 – December 30, 2002) was an American actress who made the transition from silent films to sound films.[2]
Brian was born in Corsicana, Texas,[3] the daughter of Taurrence J. Dantzler and Louise B. Her brother was Taurrence J. Dantzler, Jr.
Her father died when she was one month old and the family later moved to Dallas, Texas.[3] In the early 1920s, they moved to Long Beach, California. She had intended becoming an illustrator but that was laid aside when at age 16 she was discovered in a local bathing beauty contest. One of the judges was actress Esther Ralston (who was to play her mother in the upcoming Peter Pan and who became a lifelong friend).
She didn't win the $25 prize in the contest, but Ralston said "you've got to give the little girl something". So, her prize was to be interviewed by director Herbert Brenon for a role in Peter Pan. Brenon was recovering from eye surgery, and she spoke with him in a dimly lit room. "He asked me a few questions, Is that your hair? Out of the blue, he said I would like to make a test. Even to this day, I will never know why I was that lucky. They had made tests of every ingénue in the business for Wendy. He had decided he would go with an unknown. It would seem more like a fairy tale. It wouldn't seem right if the roles were to be taken by someone they (the audience) knew or was divorced. I got the part. They put me under contract."[citation needed] The studio renamed her Mary Brian.
After her showing in the beauty contest, she was given an audition by Paramount Pictures and cast by director Herbert Brenon as Wendy Darling in his silent movie version of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1924).[4] There, she starred with Betty Bronson and Esther Ralston, and the three of them stayed close for the rest of their lives. Ralston described both Bronson and Brian as 'very charming people'.
The movie studio, who created her stage name for the movie and said she was age 16 instead of 18 because the latter sounded too old for the role, then signed her to a long-term contract. Brian played Fancy Vanhern, daughter of Percy Marmont, in Brenon's The Street of Forgotten Men (1925), which had newcomer Louise Brooks in an uncredited role as a moll.
During her years at Paramount, Brian appeared in more than 40 movies as the lead, the ingenue or co-star. She worked with Brenon again in 1926 when she played Isabel in P.C. Wren's Beau Geste starring Ronald Colman. The same year, she made Behind the Front and Harold Teen. In 1928, she played ingenue Alice Deane in Forgotten Faces opposite Clive Brook, her sacrificing father, with Olga Baclanova as her vixen mother and William Powell as Froggy. Forgotten Faces is preserved in the Library of Congress.[5]
Her first sound film was Varsity (1928), which was filmed with part-sound and talking sequences, opposite Buddy Rogers. After successfully making the transition to sound, she co-starred with Gary Cooper, Walter Huston and Richard Arlen in The Virginian (1929), her first all-sound movie. In it, she played a spirited frontier heroine, schoolmarm Molly Stark Wood, who was the love interest of the Virginian (Cooper).
Gary Cooper and Mary Brian in a film still for The Virginian, 1929
After her contract with Paramount ended in 1932, Brian decided to freelance, which was unusual in a period when multi-year contracts with one studio were common. The same year, she appeared on the vaudeville stage at New York City's Palace Theatre. Also in the same year, she starred in Manhattan Tower.
In 1936, she went to England and made three movies, including The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss, in which she starred opposite Cary Grant, with whom she became engaged at one stage.
When World War II occurred in 1941, Brian began traveling to entertain the troops, spending most of the war years traveling the world with the U.S.O., and entertaining servicemen from the South Pacific to Europe, including Italy and North Africa. Commenting on those events, she said in 1996,
I was with Charlie Ruggles in Okinawa. And I was on the island of Tinian when they dropped the atomic bomb. Colonel Paul Tibbets, who was the pilot and the officer in charge [of dropping the bomb] took Charlie and me on the plane the next day, and nobody had been allowed in that encampment. So I was on the Enola Gay.[7]
Flying to England on a troop shoot, Brian was caught in the Battle of the Bulge and spent the Christmas of 1944 with the soldiers fighting that battle.
She appeared in only a handful of films thereafter. Her last performance in movies was in Dragnet (1947). Over the course of 22 years, Brian had appeared in more than 79 movies.
She played in the stage comedy Mary Had a Little... in 1951 in Melbourne, Australia, co-starring with John Hubbard.
Like many "older" actresses, during the 1950s, Brian created a career in television. Perhaps her most notable role was playing the title character's mother in Meet Corliss Archer in 1954.
She also dedicated much time to portrait painting after her acting years.
Although she was engaged numerous times, and was linked romantically to numerous Hollywood men, including Cary Grant and silent film actor Jack Pickford, Brian had only two husbands: magazine illustrator Jon Whitcomb (for six weeks, beginning May 4, 1941) and film editor George Tomasini (from 1947 until his death in 1964). After retiring from movies for good, she devoted herself to her husband's career; Tomasini worked as a film editor for Alfred Hitchcock on Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960).[7]
Murray campaigned for the re-election of President Herbert Hoover in 1932.[8]
She died of natural causes on December 30, 2002, at a retirement home in Del Mar, California at the age of 96.[9]
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