Betty Ross Clarke

Biography

This brown-haired, grey-eyed ingénue of the early 20's made her way to the screen via touring stock companies immediately upon completing her education. She was a vaudeville dancer, then had a small role on Broadway in 1917. Eventually, she would come to greater prominence on the London stage. During Betty's seven-year long absence from Hollywood (1924-31), she worked in England, filmed in Germany and toured Australia with her own production company in "The Ghost Train" and "The House of Glass". She remained 'down under' until 1929, having married ex-RAF pilot and banking scion Arthur Greville Collins (who, after the stock market crash of 1929 reinvented himself in Hollywood as a motion picture director and dialogue director). Since she had been performing successfully in Britain for several years, Australian media erroneously assumed Betty to be English, though she hailed from Langdon, North Dakota. At one time in her childhood, she had lived with her family on an Indian reservation. Betty was first counseled on the possibility of making movies while at a Los Angeles dinner party. However, the first half of her career in this medium proved both intermittent and desultory. She had one good role as Katherine de Vaucelles, focus of François Villon's passions in If I Were King (1920). With Paramount's decision to promote their top comic actor from two-reelers to full-length feature films, Betty found herself starring alongside Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle in back-to-back comedies: Brewster's Millions (1921) and Traveling Salesman (1921). These proved considerably more successful than her subsequent ventures into hokum melodrama. The following year, Betty took off for Europe (she claimed to prefer the cooler climate to California), where she made a few more unremarkable films. After a lengthy hiatus, she managed to reignite her screen career as a supporting actress in early talkies. She was one of the more noteworthy victims in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and filled in for Sara Haden as Aunt Millie in two of the Hardy Family movies. Most of her other 1930's roles were merely uncredited bits, as 'no-name' nurses, secretaries or mothers. After a brief return to the stage at the beginning of the next decade, she died rather suddenly in January 1947 at the age of fifty from undisclosed causes.