Elita Proctor Otis

Biography

Indianapolis, 1860: Elita Proctor Otis drew her first breath in a city of gaslight and cobblestones, and by 1909 she had already slipped into fairy silk for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, traded it for ragamuffin rags in Oliver Twist, and, a decade later, wrapped herself in Arctic mystery for Under Northern Lights. Between those flickers on the screen she married twice—first to Wall-Street numbers-man William Carpenter Camp, then to brush-wielding dreamer Charles Howard Johnson. The curtain fell for the last time on 10 August 1927 in Pelham, New York, but the light she kindled on early celluloid still glimmers.