Edna Maison

Biography

San Francisco, 17 August 1892—at least that’s the year Edna Maison preferred—handed a new-born named Carmen Edna Maisonave to a French grocer and his wife. The family soon swapped fog for sunshine, resettling in Los Angeles where the girl enrolled at Immaculate Heart Academy and, at six, trod the boards with the Cooper Stock Company in Burbank. Between solos for the California and Edgar Temple opera companies she squeezed classes at Woodbury Business College, then banged out shorthand as a stenographer until a clothing salesman named Tom Poste won her hand in September 1911. Pathé’s cameras found her the next year. One debut—The Girl Sheriff—and more than thirty quick-fire releases followed; Misleading Evidence and A Double Reward counted among them, posters sometimes shortening her surname to “Miss Mason.” Vacations bored her, so when Universal dangled leads in 1914 she snapped up The Unmasking, Courage, and Their Island of Happiness without pausing for breath. The glow of marquee lights couldn’t outshine a violent marriage; a missing tooth became Exhibit A in a 1917 divorce. On 28 November that same year she swapped vows with film executive Beverly Griffith, then quietly stepped away from celluloid after finishing 1918’s The Mysterious Mr. Drama. Two decades of housekeeping and passport stamps followed. Age and illness crept in, the second marriage ended in 1938, and on 11 January 1946 heart disease closed the final curtain. She rests at Los Angeles’ Calvary Cemetery, fifty-three years of steadfast motion finally at rest.