Born Today November 25: Margaret Livingston

1900-1984

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, she followed her older Ivy into acting.  She made her film debut in The Chain Invisible in 1916, obviously as a teenager, in an actual named part.  She made more than 50 films, the bulk of her career, in the silent era.  She made the successful change to talking parts in the late 1920's with her first full talkie coming in 1929 in The Canary Murder Case, she even did a turn as a Vamp in 1928 in Beware of Bachelors an early partial talkie.  What she is most famous for is her third billing in Marnau's  Sunrise, as "The Woman From The City;" which won 3 of the very first Oscars ever awarded.  She continued her career well into the 1930's, but retired from acting when she Jazz musician Paul Whiteman, and never returned.  She is portrayed Claudia Harrison in Peter Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow (2001), which is a seriously fictionalized story based on what may or may not have happened early film pioneer Thomas Ince, that led to his death days after being on board newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst's yacht one weekend in 1924.  She died in Warrington, Pennsylvania on 13 December 1984.  She shares a birthday with my son!  She is interred at First Presbyterian Church of Ewing Cemetery in Ewing, New Jersey.

A fashion photo of her dating from 1927.

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Happy Birthday Mr. P.!!

The Invaders (1912)

This is a very western that actually shows a great deal of sympathy with Native Americans.  It is a story of broken treaties.  I was either directed by Francis Ford or Thomas H. Ince, or possible co-directed by the two.  It feature Luther Standing Bear (that in Mato Nanji in Lakota) and numerous other Oglala Sioux.  It also features Anna Little, the one actor in the film playing a native role who was not Oglala, although she, like me, was part Native American.  So the native cast here is completely authentic, unlike what you find in later westerns coming out of Hollywood.  This is here today to protest the continuing celebration any where here in the New World of "Columbus Day."