Dorothy Davenport

Biography

Dorothy Davenport arrived in the world already center-stage: her aunt Fanny commanded the boards as the era’s tragedienne supreme, her father Harry had leapt from Broadway gaslight to flickering celluloid, and her mother Alice juggled matinee applause with silent-film close-ups. By fourteen Dorothy was slipping into crowd scenes, learning camera grammar before she’d finished grammar school. At seventeen Universal stamped her “star,” and on the same lot a jack-of-all-trades hireling—actor, prop fetcher, sometime scribbler—named Wallace Reid kept dropping leads. Day one of their first pairing she ranked his talent somewhere below a cardboard cut-out; day three he out-rode the stunt crew bareback and Dorothy, lifelong equestrian, decided brains could be taught, horsemanship couldn’t. Six months later Wallace rode back from a loan-out, and on 13 October 1913 they married between takes. For the next year the Reids were Universal’s assembly line: two one-reelers a week, Wallace directing, both of them starring, swapping costumes faster than stagehands could strike sets. When Wallace’s career galloped off the lot, Dorothy traded greasepaint for booties; in 1916 she peeked back at the cameras for a few cameos, then retired for good—she thought—when son Wallace Jr. arrived in 1917. The fairy tale ended in 1923 when morphine, administered for an on-set injury, killed Wallace. Widowed and furious, Dorothy corralled friend Bessie Love and poured her grief onto the screen with Human Wreckage, a scorching exposé of narcotics traffic. She stepped away again, returning only to co-write, co-produce, and star in The Red Kimono (1926), a ripped-from-the-headlines drama that wore its social conscience like a silk banner. Scripts, producing ledgers, and the occasional riding crop filled the decades that followed, while Dorothy Davenport Reid kept rewriting the family business on her own terms.