Evelyn Greeley

Biography

A veil of Old-World fog hangs over Evelyn Greeley’s earliest years: born Evelyn Huber in Austria in 1888, she slipped across the Atlantic and reinvented herself in Chicago, sharpening her mind at the University School for Girls and the rigorous Frances Shimer Academy, where music and paint were as compulsory as breathing. Stage lights found her first. Touring with the Poli Players stock troupe, she learned to make an audience gasp, then drifted into the flickering orbit of Essanay Studios, spending a year as an anonymous face in the crowd. Recognition arrived in 1915 when Quality Pictures handed her a named role in The Second in Command; within months World Film Corporation pinned her under contract and set the cameras whirring. Between 1917 and 1919 she headlined roughly twenty-four features, trading smoldering glances with steady leading man Carlyle Blackwell. When World Film cut her loose in 1920, the offers thinned. One last marquee flashed—Bulldog Drummond in 1922—before she stepped away from celluloid and toward the altar. A brief, brittle union with actor John Smiley shattered almost as soon as the vows were spoken; her second husband, industrialist James Rand, stayed the course for thirty-five summers. After that marriage dissolved in 1960, she tried once more, wedding Morgan Laity. The final curtain fell in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1975.