Beatrix Templeton

Biography

Beatrix Templeton stepped before the camera when British silent cinema was still inventing its own grammar. In 1914 she gave face to the tragedy of The Loss of the Birkenhead, then slipped into the title role of The Princess of Happy Chance two years later, letting her eyes do the talking in an era before dialogue. By 1920 she was steering a battered family through storm-swept melodrama in Torn Sails, proving her gift for weathering emotional gales as fiercely as any North Sea squall. Her story flickered out on 2 May 1924 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but the images she left behind still run, ghost-bright, across the silver fabric of early film.