1906-1990
Child actress Doris Ethel Hollister was born on this day in New York to actress Alice Hollister and cinematographer George K. Hollister Sr.; she was the older sister of fellow child actor George Hollister Jr. She made her film debut in the Sidney Olcott early feature From the Manger to the Cross; or, Jesus of Nazareth in which her mother played Mary Magdalene. The film had a much larger uncredited cast than it did a credited one, she was just one of many who appeared without credit--which also saw her younger brother appear as Jesus as a child sans a credit; she was just 6 years of age when the film was filmed all over the middle east and north Africa in 1912. Her first film acting credit came the very next spring. Again acting with her mother and younger brother, she played the daughter in the Robert Vignola short immigration drama The Alien, which was released in May of 1913 when she was still just 6. In all, she appeared in just seven films, none of them past the age of 7. All of her films were Kalem productions, and all, save for the first one, were shorts. Historically, the most well known of these films was an adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin; released in 1913--it featured an all white cast in blackface parts, of which her brother George was a member. Her last film appearance came in the Kenean Buel directed western The Brand, which was released in August of 1914. As an adult, Doris was married for a time to extremely prolific animation director/producer Walter Lantz; they divorced in 1940. She died in Tustin, California on the 26th of July in 1990 at the age of 83. She is reportedly interred not far from the ashes of her parents at the Iris Terrace of Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.
Still from The Atheist (1913) with Tom Moore and Alfrede Handsworth
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