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I didn’t want to, but I was loaned to the Ince branch, and lured Bill Hart in a Mexican border affair. He asked me to do the vamping señorita in his next picture. “ was watching Chet Withey direct Doug Fairbanks and me in one of those light Manhattan-cocktail comedies that Doug made famous. Oettinger in Picture-Play magazine, April 1922 Thomas Gladysz is a Bay Area arts journalist and editor of the “Louise Brooks edition” of The Diary of a Lost Girl. He is also the director of the Louise Brooks Society, which he founded in 1995.ĪLMA RUBENS: IN HER OWN WORDS Excerpts from an article by Malcolm H.

Marked woman movie#

The New York Daily News shouted its headline: “Why I Remain a Dope Fiend: The Most Amazing Confession Ever Told! Alma Rubens’ Own Story, Written Personally by the Once Great Movie Star Who Was Ruined by Drugs.” In poor health, Rubens died shortly after its publication.

In 1931, Rubens’s sensational confession detailing her troubled life was serialized in newspapers across the country. Soon, however, all her accomplishments were eclipsed. One of her last films was the part-talkie Show Boat (1929), in which she received fifth billing as the tragic Julie. Hart, Lon Chaney, Lionel Barrymore, John Gilbert, Bela Lugosi, and George O’Brien. She appeared in melodramas, crime stories, and westerns alongside the likes of William S. Griffith, Henry King, Victor Sjöström, and Frank Borzage (four times). Over the course of her career, Rubens worked with some of the best directors of her time: Raoul Walsh, D.W. She was also briefly and unhappily married to three well-known Hollywood figures, including actor Ricardo Cortez. By the late 1920s, Rubens had been in trouble with the law, attempted to get clean, was hospitalized, escaped from a sanatorium, and was in and out of the headlines. William Randolph Hearst, who had produced several of her films, helped support her at Marion Davies’s request. Rubens’s earnings, as much as $3,000 a week at the height of her career, were squandered in search of her next high. In 1926, newly signed MGM actress Greta Garbo replaced her as the female lead in The Torrent.

She became increasingly unreliable, and colleagues noted her “drifting speech and glassy eyes” on set. Rubens’s cocaine and morphine use had begun to take its toll. The hits that followed include the original Humoresque (1920), The World and His Wife (1920), Enemies of Women (1923), The Price She Paid (1924), and East Lynne (1925).Īfter a busy 1925–1926, this dark-eyed beauty found it difficult to get roles, but not because her star had dimmed. In 1918, Rubens had top billing in every film in which she appeared. In 1917, she starred in the box-office smash The Firefly of Tough Luck and The Regenerates, a drama about drug addiction, both directed by E. While still a teen, Rubens went from supporting player to acclaim as a leading lady. Bigger roles alongside Fairbanks in Reggie Mixes In (1916), The Half-Breed (1916), and The Americano (1917) got her noticed. Early roles include The Narcotic Spectre (1914), as well as bit parts in Peer Gynt (1915), The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), and the Douglas Fairbanks cocaine comedy The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916). Born in San Francisco in 1897, Rubens appeared in nearly 60 films for the Triangle, Famous Players, Cosmopolitan, and Fox studios. Today, Alma Rubens is remembered not for her films or versatility as an actress, but for the demons that plagued her and ultimately ended her life. | Marked Woman | Movies (function(w,d,s,l,i).euvXwP a svg.This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of The Half-Breed at SFSFF 2013