Actress Laura Sawyer, also sometimes known as "the Edison Girl," was born on this day in Iron County, Missouri some 75 miles south of St. Louis. She was one of several actresses pinned with the moniker, but she was reportedly Thomas Edison's personal favorite actress as the studio. Not a great deal is known of her childhood, but it is known that she attended a boarding school in St. Louis as a teen. Somewhere along the way, she became interested in/invovled with theatrical acting. Before joining Edison's aging studio in 1911, she worked with Otis Skinner's company (a well rounded actor/director, who was also a Shakespearean specialist). She may have joined Edison in 1911 as a regular actress, but she is listed as appearing in the odd film before that, starting with Cupid's Pranks in 1908 (a film that survives and has been restored). In fact, she is listed as appearing in five Edison shorts before 1911, most directed by J. Searle Dawley or Edwin S. Porter; also in her appearance in the 1910 "political thriller" Through the Clouds, she plays actor Charles Ogle's daughter (Ogle was kind of the first "man of a thousand faces"). Her first listed film with Edison in 1911 is The Black Bordered Letter, where she again appears with Ogle and British born actor Herbert Prior. During her formal tenure at Edison, she made some 70+ films in just three years, almost all of them shorts. Her last listed Edison film was The Green Eye of the Yellow God (September 1913), based on a poem, also with Ogle. It appears that Thomas Edison was not the only admirer of Sawyer as an actress, when Dawley left Edison's employ for Famous Players in 1913, he took Sawyer with him. She appeared in two detective films, in what we would now call shorts (both around 40 minutes long),the films were among the very first Dawley directed at his new production home: Chelsea 7750 and An Hour Before Dawn in which she plays the lead detective--unheard of at the time. She then took the character of Detective Kate Kirby into the feature: The Port of Doom in November 1913. She only appeared in five more films after this, all of them directed by Dawley. Three, however, were made through production with the short lived Dyreda Art Film Corp. formed by Dawley, J. Parker Read and former Edison man Frank L. Dyer. She appeared in the company's very first release One of Millions, released in November of 1914. Her last film role came in the melodrama The Daughter of the People in 1915. All of these titles were also written by Dawley and the last of them was based on a play that he penned. She then retired from the business, got married and had at least one child, a daughter, who was born in 1920. She died on the 7th of September in 1970 in Matawan, NJ, at the age of 85. There is no information on her burial.
Publicity still from 1913
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