Alice Joyce

Alice Joyce (1890-1955) was an American silent screen actress, who appeared in more than 200 films during the 1910s and 1920s. Joyce spent time with Kalem (1910–1915) and Vitagraph (1916–1921) and later worked freelance for various studios. At the peak of her career, she was nicknamed 'the Madonna of the Screen'.


British postcard. Photo: Kalem.


British postcard. Photo: Kalem.


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Ballerini & Fratini, Firenze, no. 485. Photo: United Artists. Alice Joyce in Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925).


Austrian postcard by Iris Verlag, no. 749. Photo: Fanamet.

Well-behaved ladies of a better society

Alice Joyce was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1890. Her parents were John Edward Joyce, a smelter worker, and Vallie Olive McIntyre Joyce, a seamstress. She had a younger brother, Francis 'Frank' Joyce, who later became an entertainment manager. She began her career at 13 as a telephone operator, modelling on the side in the summer when business was slow. Due to her striking looks, she became one of the top models for commercial artists in Kansas City.

She obtained a try-out at Biograph Pictures but was rejected by D.W. Griffith. It was director Sidney Olcott at the Kalem Company in New York City who gave Alice Joyce her first chance, casting her in his production, The Deacon's Daughter (Sidney Olcott, 1910). Joyce quickly rose to become one of the biggest stars of Kalem Studios. Jon C. Hopwood at IMDb: "Kalem was one of the first companies to break the movie industry practice of not crediting its performers, and it began to feature Alice in its publicity and advertising. By April 1911 she was already being cited by name in reviews, and she soon became well-known.

Returning to New York in the summer of 1912, Joyce was now a popular screen favourite and Kalem's biggest star. She even appeared as herself in Rube Marquard Wins (1912), a two-reeler featuring the future baseball Hall of Famer, who had set a major-league record with 19 straight wins that year for the pennant-winning New York Giants."Alice played mostly well-behaved ladies of the better society in melodramas, comedies and occasionally crime stories. She was eventually sent to work under director Kenean Buel on the West Coast after Kalem acquired the old Essanay Studios property in East Hollywood in October 1913.

The leading man for many of her films in this period was Tom Moore, one of a famous family of Irish actors. Eventually, Tom and Alice fell in love and were married in 1914, while on location for The Girl and the Stowaway (Kenean Buel, 1914) in Jacksonville, Florida. In the middle of 1914, Kalem launched the two-reel 'Alice Joyce Series', releasing a new film of hers every two weeks. The studio transferred Moore to another film unit to co-star with Marguerite Courtot, while Guy Coombs was made Joyce's new leading man.

With the merger of Kalem with Vitagraph in 1916, the popularity of Joyce increased. Feature films had pushed one- and two-reelers out of the marketplace as nickelodeons were replaced by converted vaudeville houses and movie cathedrals. Joyce was cast in two of J. Stuart Blackton's films: Whom the Gods Destroy (1916), a near-contemporaneous tale of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland, and the patriotic potboiler Womanhood, the Glory of the Nation (1917). Her biggest hit was Within the Law (William P.S. Earle, 1917), the film version of Bayard Veiller's vastly popular stage melodrama, in which she played Mary Turner, a young shopgirl unjustly convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison. There she studies the law and comes to the conclusion that there are many ways to break the law.


Vintage postcard. Photo: Kalem.


British postcard. Photo: Kalem.


British postcard in the Famous Cinema Star Series by Beagles & Co, Ltd, no. 147. A.


British postcard in the "Pictures" Portrait Gallery, no. 125.


French postcard in the Les Vedettes du Cinéma series by Editions Filma, no. 38. Photo: Vitagraph.

A well-endowed contract with First National

Alice Joyce was known as 'The Madonna of the Screen' for her striking features and presence. Until 1921, Joyce played mostly naive ingénue roles for Vitagraph, but slowly as she started to work independently, she also took on some more mature roles. She appeared in The Green Goddess (Sidney Olcott, 1923) opposite the great stage actor George Arliss. In 1924 she acted opposite Clive Brook in the British production The Passionate Adventure (Graham Cutts, 1924). The screenplay was co-written by a young filmmaker named Alfred Hitchcock, who also served as art director.

1925 was one of her most productive years. She played opposite Percy Marmont in Frank Borzage's Daddy's Gone A-Hunting and was Stella's rival Helen Morrison in Henry King's Stella Dallas. Five months later she played Clara Bow's mother in Dancing Mothers (Herbert Brenon, 1926). She played a woman who is denied any pleasure in life by her heartless husband and thoughtless daughter. It was one of Joyce's greatest successes. She also played a princess opposite W.C. Fields in the comedy So's Your Old Man (Gregory La Cava, 1926).

In 1927 Joyce signed a well-endowed contract with First National, where she received a few substantial film roles, as in The Squall (Alexander Korda, 1929), starring Myrna Loy and Loretta Young, and based on the 1926 play 'The Squall' by Jean Bart. Joyce made a smooth transition from silent film to sound film and co-acted with George Arliss in The Green Goddess (Alfred E. Green, 1930), the remake of a film in which both stars had a success in 1923. Arliss was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance.

In 1930, she also made her last film, Song o' My Heart (Frank Borzage, 1930), after which she and her ex-husband Tom Moore worked a late vaudeville circuit for a time. A lengthy heart disease (Louise Brooks claimed that it was an alcohol problem) forced her into a private life. She declared voluntary bankruptcy in 1933. Alice Joyce was first married to actor Tom Moore (1914-1920) with whom she had a daughter, Alice Joyce Moore (1916–1960). Then she was married to James Regan (1920-1932), son of the managing director of the old Knickerbocker Hotel. She had a second daughter with him, Margaret (Peggy) Regan.

Finally, she married director Clarence Brown in 1933, a six-time Oscar nominee who was one of the studio's top directors. Joyce was active in San Fernando Valley women's organisations. She did book reviews and made sketches for friends. In 1946, after her divorce from Brown, Joyce was seriously injured in a traffic accident. Clarence Brown remained with her for nine hours and paid her medical bills. The actress was ill for several years before her death from a blood and heart ailment at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. Alice Joyce died in 1955 at the age of 65. Joyce was interred next to her mother, Vallie, in the San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, Los Angeles, California. Next to Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, she was one of the few stars who was a star from the beginnings of commercial cinema, when it was still called Nickelodeon, right up to the sound film days.


French postcard by Editions Cinémagazine, no. 286.


German postcard. Ross Verlag, no. 1307/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Loew-Metro-Goldwyn.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 1442/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Paramount -Film.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 6467/1, 1931-1932. Photo: Fox.


Italian postcard. Photo: Foto Ebano.

Sources: Jon C. Hopwood (IMDb), Wikipedia (German and English) and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 28 November 2024.

50 years The Parade’s Gone By

The Giornate del Cinema Muto honours the 50 years of existence of The Parade’s Gone By. British film historian Kevin Brownlow’s classic oral history survey was first published in 1968. Not a history book in the usual sense, it describes early Hollywood primarily through the recollections of people who were there. As Lincoln Spector concludes in a post on his blog, Bayflicks: "The current access to silent films that we all enjoy is, to a large extent, the result of Brownlow’s life's work. And The Parade’s Gone By was the beginning." Six American silent films, which were discussed in Brownlow's study, will be presented in a special programme in Pordenone. To honour Giornate, Brownlow’s work and silent Hollywood, we selected a series of postcards on the stars and on one of the directors of these six films, plus some additional cards on early studios.


James Cruze. American postcard by Krauss Mfg. Co., New York. Photo: Thanhouser. Publicity still for the 23-episode serial The Million Dollar Mystery (Howard Hansel, 1914), produced by Thanhouser. See the flipside of the picture below.


American postcard by Krauss Mfg. Co., New York. Thanhouser. Retro of a postcard for James Cruze in the 23 episodes of the Thanhouser serial The Million Dollar Mystery (Howard Hansel, 1914), starring Cruze and Florence La Badie. The card says the actor will personally appear at the Crescent Theater on Saturday, May 22nd, "to tell about his experiences in the motion picture world and shake hands with all his admirers". The serial is presumably lost. This card refers to a screening on Saturday, 22 May 1915, while the serial had started in June 1914. The Crescent may refer to the Ithaca cinema, The Crescent, that opened in 1914. Its rival, the Star Cinema, had shown the serial in the Summer of 1914.

James Cruze

The oldest film shown in the programme is The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923), starring J. Warren Kerrigan and Lois Wilson. James Cruze (1884-1942) was an American actor and director of the silent screen. At the age of 16, he played his first roles on the stage and in 1906, he became a member of the then-well-known Belasco troupe, with whom he performed regularly on Broadway. Already in 1908, he changed profession and participated in countless films of Lubin, from 1910, and from 1912 onwards at the Thanhouser film company, both East Coast companies. In 1915, Thanhouser dismissed Cruze despite the success of his serials The Million Dollar Mystery and Zudora (both 1914).

Cruze moved to Hollywood in the mid-1910s and began his career as a director in 1919, primarily for Paramount. He first became known through several comedies with Wallace Reid and Fatty Arbuckle in the lead roles. Most of his Arbuckle comedies were withdrawn and destroyed after 1921, at the height of the scandal around the silent film actor.

Cruze's best-known film is the Western The Covered Wagon (1923), depicting the migration of German emigrants to the West of North America and their conflicts with each other and with Indians. The film was carefully researched with a great eye for detail. It was one of the most commercially successful representatives of his genre from the early days of film and received several awards.

James Cruze's film Hollywood, also released in 1923, was the first film to cast a critical eye over the facade of the dream factory, relentlessly revealing the manipulation of the audience through partially fictitious stories about the stars of the screen. At the same time, the film was a tribute to Fatty Arbuckle and did not spare criticism of the behaviour of the producers towards the actor.

In 1925, Cruze used techniques from German Expressionism for work on Beggar on a Horseback and was able to convince the critics with a dense dramaturgy and, for the time, exciting new camera settings. His demise began the following year, as the Western Old Ironside, produced with high financial cost, flopped at the box office. It would take years before another lavishly produced Western came into the national cinemas. In the 1930s, James Cruze's career faltered. In 1938, he retired after some B-movies and in 1942, he died completely impoverished and largely forgotten.


J. Warren Kerrigan. British postcard.


Lois Wilson. French postcard in the Les Vedettes de Cinéma series by A.N., Paris, no. 25. Photo: Paramount.

Jean Paige

The second film in the Parade’s Gone By homage is the Vitagraph production Captain Blood (David Smith, 1924), starring Jean Paige and J. Warren Kerrigan. Jean Paige (1895-1990) was a silent film actress whose whole career happened at the Vitagraph company. Eventually, she married its president.

Jean Paige was born Lucile Beatrice O'Hair in 1895 in Paris, Illinois and was raised on her father's farm there, developing a love for horses while living there. Paige made twenty-one films in a career which began in 1917 at the Vitagraph company and concluded there in 1924. Her first screen appearance came in two-reeler features based on O'Henry stories, starting with Blind Man's Holiday (Martin Justice, 1917).

She came to prominence in the Vitagraph film Too Many Crooks (Ralph Ince, 1919). As Charlotte Brown, she made a star part out of a bit part. Jean had never appeared on stage and had no experience in movies before becoming a Vitagraph leading woman.

Her role in Too Many Crooks led Vitagraph president Albert E. Smith to elevate her position at the film studio. Remarkable feature-length films at Vitagraph with Paige starring were, a.o. The Darkest Hour (Paul Scardon, 1919), Daring Hearts (Henry Houry, 1919), The Birth of a Soul (Edwin L. Hollywood, 1920), Black Beauty (David Smith, 1921), The Prodigal Judge (Edward José, 1922), and her final film, Captain Blood (uncredited: David Smith, Albert E. Smith, 1924).

Eventually, Paige married Smith himself in 1920 - she was his third wife. She stopped acting, and they stayed together until he died in 1958. In 1925, Vitagraph was sold to Warner Bros. In 1931, Smith bought the residential apartment building of Chateau Marmont and turned it into a hotel.


British postcard by Cinema Chat. Photo: Hill / Vitagraph. Jean Paige. 


Jane Paige, aka Jean Paige. French postcard by A.N., Paris in the Les Vedettes de Cinéma series, no. 91. Photo: Film Vitagraph.


Alice Joyce. German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 1307/1. Photo: Loew-Metro-Goldwyn.

Alice Joyce

The stars of The Home Maker (King Baggot, 1925) were Alice Joyce and Clive Brook. The film was produced by King Baggot Productions and Universal. Alice Joyce (1890-1955) was an American screen actress who, at the peak of her career, was nicknamed the Madonna of the Screen. Born in Kansas City, Joyce began her career as a telephone operator. Through various modelling activities, she got her first role in the film.

From 1910 on, she quickly rose to become one of the biggest stars of Kalem Studios and played mostly well-behaved ladies of the better society in melodramas, comedies and occasionally crime stories. After the merger of Kalem and Vitagraph in 1916, the popularity of Joyce increased. Until the 1920s, she specialised in naive women, but slowly, she also took on some mature roles. In 1924, she acted opposite Clive Brook in the British production The Passionate Adventure by Graham Cutts.

1925 was one of her most productive years. She played opposite Percy Marmont in Frank Borzage's Daddy's Gone A-Hunting. She was Stella's rival, Helen Morrison, in Henry King's Stella Dallas. And she was Clara Bow's mother in Herbert Brenon's Dancing Mothers, one of Joyce's greatest successes. In the latter, she is a woman who is denied any pleasure in life by her heartless husband and thoughtless daughter.

In 1925, Joyce also played opposite Clive Brook in King Baggot’s The Home Maker, about a man crippled after a failed suicide attempt. He switches roles with his wife, who climbs the corporate ladder at his old company. Both are happy with the new situation until the man discovers that his legs are getting better. In 1926, she played a princess opposite W.C. Fields in the comedy So's Your Old Man by Gregory La Cava. In 1927, Joyce signed a well-endowed contract with First National, where she received a few substantial film roles, as in The Squall (Alexander Korda, 1929), starring Myrna Loy.

Joyce made a smooth transition from silent film to sound film and, in 1930, co-starred with George Arliss in The Green Goddess, the remake of a film in which both stars had had a success in 1923. However, a lengthy heart disease (Louise Brooks claims that it was an alcohol problem) forced her into private life after 1930.


Pauline Frederick. British postcard by Lilywhite Ltd. Photo: Stoll Pictures.


Pauline Frederick. British postcard by Lilywhite Ltd. Photo: Goldwyn Pictures.

Pauline Frederick

Another film in the Parade’s Gone By homage is the Universal production Smouldering Fires (Clarence Brown, 1925), starring Pauline Frederick. Pauline Frederick (1883-1938) was an American theatre and film actress. Frederick made a name for herself in the theatre and had already passed thirty when she became successful in Hollywood. In the period of silent film, she was one of the most powerful actresses in the film industry.

In 1914, Pauline Frederick was hired by Famous Players. She saw the film industry as a temporary getaway, but encouraged by the success of her first role in The Eternal City (Hugh Ford, Edwin S. Porter, 1915), she signed a contract. Although she had already passed 30, she became one of the biggest stars in the silent film period. She played mainly sophisticated or demanding, classy women and femme fatales. In 1919, Frederick signed a contract with Goldwyn Pictures. Critics agreed that she was assigned roles there that were more suitable for her. The budget of the films she worked on was larger, and the films were better received in terms of quality.

Although her career ran smoothly, her private life was a disaster. Her first husband was a violent alcoholic and drug addict who regularly mistreated his wife, so in 1919 she applied for a divorce. As a result of the relocation of Goldwyn, Frederick moved to California in 1920. That same year, she played in Madame X (Frank Lloyd, 1920), the movie she became most familiar with. Despite the success she enjoyed at Goldwyn, she left the studio for a contract with Robertson-Cole, where she received a fixed salary of $ 7,000 per week. It was a misstep in her career. Most films flopped, and reviewers spoke negatively about them. In 1922, her contract was terminated, and she returned to the stage.

In 1924 she was hired by the Vitagraph Company and achieved success in films such as Three Women (Ernst Lubitsch, 1924), with May McAvoy and Marie Prevost as the other women and Lew Cody as the man in the middle, and Smouldering Fires (Clarence Brown, 1925), in which she is a successful businesswoman who marries her younger employee (Malcolm McGregor), though he is in love with her younger sister (Laura LaPlante). Frederick became a role model and style icon for older women.

Her career dwindled in the 1930s. The reason was not so much the new sound film (as Frederick had good diction) but rather the loss of prestige. Her private life was increasingly getting difficult, with unfortunate marriages and the death of her mother, but it was her asthma that killed her in 1938. Pauline Frederick was only 55.


Visitors at the Entrance to Universal City. American postcard by Van Ornum Colorprint Co, Los Angeles, no. 778. This postcard may refer to the opening of the Second Universal City on Lankershim Bd on 15 March 1915.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3533/1. Photo: MGM. Lillian Gish and Ralph Forbes in The Enemy (Fred Niblo, 1927).

Lillian Gish

Lillian Gish and Ralph Forbes were the stars in the MGM production The Enemy (Fred Niblo, 1927). The plot takes place in Austria during the First World War. Carl Behrend (Ralph Forbes) and Pauli Arndt (Lillian Gish) have just married. He is the son of a businessman (George Fawcett), and she is the daughter of a professor (Frank Currier).

When the First World War breaks out, Carl is drafted and called to the front. There, he has to endure major suffering. Life is hard for those left behind, too. Pauli is starving and despairs, even more so when her father is reviled for his pacifist opinions. She becomes a prostitute and loses her baby...

Handsome English actor Ralph Forbes (1904–1951) started his film career in the British cinema before he became a Hollywood star of the 1920s and 1930s. Later, he turned into a noted Broadway actor.

American actress Lillian Gish (1893-1993) was 'The First Lady of the Silent Screen'. During the 1910s, she was one of director D.W. Griffith's greatest stars. She appeared in such classic features as The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915), Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith, 1919), and Orphans of the Storm (D.W. Griffith, 1921).

After 13 years with Griffith, she moved to MGM, where her first picture was La bohème (1926). In the 1940s, she again appeared in a handful of films and received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her role as Laura Belle McCanles in Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946). Her last film was The Whales of August (Lindsay Anderson, 1987), in which she shared the lead with Bette Davis.


The Metro studios. American postcard by California Postcard Co., Los Angeles. Photo: Glen G. Stone, Los Angeles. The caption at the flipside: "Showing the space-saving device of building a 'set' within a 'set', and further of setting up an 'exterior' within an 'interior'. A mining town street scene is in the course of construction within a palatial drawing-room; an interesting side-light on picture-making ingenuity."


Evelyn Brent. German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 4004/1, 1929-1930. Photo: Paramount.

Thomas Meighan

A final film in the Parade’s Gone By homage is another film by James Cruze, The Mating Call (James Cruze, 1928), a production by The Caddo Company and Paramount. The star was American stage and screen actor Thomas Meighan (1879-1936). Meighan began his acting career as a stage performer on Broadway between 1900 and 1912. Though he became a well-known film star from the late 1910s on, he remained devoted to the stage. This is also where he met his wife, Frances Ring.

From 1914 to 1928, Meighan contributed to nearly eighty silent films, mostly produced by the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. In 1915, Famous Players gave Meighan a contract. In 1919, he had his breakthrough with The Miracle Man (George Loane Tucker, 1919), about con men who want to use a faith healer to collect money. The film co-starred Betty Compson and Lon Chaney.

Notably, Meighan appeared in seven films by William C. de Mille and five others by his brother Cecil B. DeMille. Three of these are among his best-known films: Male and Female (Cecil B. DeMille, 1919), Why Change Your Wife? (Cecil B. DeMille, 1920) and Manslaughter (Cecil B. DeMille, 1922).

His female partners included Renée Adorée (two films), Louise Brooks (one film The City Gone Wild (James Cruze, 1927)), Billie Burke (five films), Gloria Swanson and Bebe Daniels (two films, Male and Female and Why Change Your Wife?), Pauline Frederick (five films), Leatrice Joy (three films in 1922, including Manslaughter), Lila Lee (eleven films, including Male and Female, their first ensemble), Mary Pickford (one film: M'liss (Marshall Neilan, 1918)), Blanche Sweet (five films), Norma Talmadge (three films), Virginia Valli (two films), and Lois Wilson (five films, including Manslaughter).

His final silent films were The Mating Call and Racket, both produced by Howard Hughes in 1928. The Mating Call deals with a soldier who returns home from World War I to find his secret marriage has been annulled and his wife (Evelyn Brent) has remarried. At Ellis Island, he finds a French woman to pose as his wife (Renée Adorée), but they gradually fall in love. Thomas Meighan's first sound feature film was Howard Bretherton's The Argyle Case, with HB Warner, Lila Lee, and Zasu Pitts, and released in 1929. Meighan only made five other talking movies, the last one being Peck's Bad Boy (Edward F. Cline, 1934) with Jackie Cooper. Two years later, in 1936, Thomas Meighan died prematurely of lung cancer. Meighan was involved in two Hollywood scandals: he was the only witness at the secret marriage of Jack Pickford and Olive Thomas, and he paid a large share of the bail to get Rudolph Valentino out of prison after the latter was accused of bigamy.


Thomas Meighan. French postcard by Editions Cinémagazine, no. 39. Photo: Apeda.


Thomas Meighan and his not-so-happy-looking children. French postcard by A.N. Paris, in the Les Vedettes de Cinéma series, no. 21. Photo: Paramount.

Sources: Lincoln Spector (Bay Flicks), Wikipedia and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 25 July 2025.