Jacqueline Logan

Biography

Beautiful auburn-haired, green-eyed leading lady of the silent screen, a "hand-picked" (by the great Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. himself) Ziegfeld Follies girl of 1920. "Jackie" was the daughter of architect Charles A. Logan and the Boston Conservatory opera singer and music teacher Marion Logan. She had a bit of a musical background, singing and learning to play piano and pipe organ at an early age. She was educated in Colorado and briefly worked as a newspaper reporter prior to finding her way into an acting troupe bound for Chicago. Having lied about her age, she was eventually let go and made her own way to New York, where (still without the requisite approval or even knowledge of her parents as to her newfound acting ambitions) she made her theatrical debut in a revival of "Floradora" in 1920. That same year she appeared as a dancer in the Follies and modeled as a "Dobbs Girl" for noted Broadway photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston (1885-1971). After successful auditions (with a little mentoring from the actor Ben Lyon), she began to grace the screen in 1922 and quickly moved on to leading roles in westerns, dramas and romantic comedies. Her part as Mary Magdalene in Cecil B. DeMille's epic The King of Kings (1927) is often cited as her most high-profile performance. Unaccountably, though she took vocal lessons, her career in talking pictures never took off. Her looks remained exquisite and her voice was apparently good enough for the Broadway stage, to which she returned-- albeit unsuccessfully--in the mid-'30s. She attempted another comeback on the London stage and co-starred with English matinée idol Owen Nares in the comedy The Middle Watch (1930). Under contract to British International Pictures the following year, she wrote and directed the crime comedy Strictly Business (1931), a modest box-office success. However, upon her return to Hollywood, she found all doors firmly closed. Another Dorothy Arzner was not what the studios had in mind. She may well have been too outspoken for her time, for in her later years she took on another role as a determined advocate of right-wing conservatism.