Caroline Frances Cooke

Biography

Born in the frost of an Illinois winter on 29 December 1875, Caroline Frances Cooke grew up to split her life between the footlights and the page. She stepped before the cameras for the lost 1916 silent *A Story of the Rand*, haunted the alpine sets of *The Bells* a decade later, and, in 1939, slipped into the torch-lit corridors of *Son of Frankenstein* as one of Universal’s unseen hands. Off-screen she wrote, reshaping words the way she reshaped characters. In 1901 she wed director Lorimer Johnston, a partnership that endured through touring companies and studio backlots alike. Cooke’s final curtain fell in Los Angeles on 8 July 1962, closing a long career that had spanned the birth of cinema and the talkie revolution.