Jane Novak

Biography

A St. Louis winter brought Jane Novak into the world on 12 January 1896; by seventeen she had already traded Missouri chill for California sunshine after a director spotted her photograph on aunt Anne Schaefer’s dressing-room table and insisted the wistful blonde step before the camera. Vitagraph signed her in 1913 and immediately cast niece alongside aunt in one-reelers such as Anne of the Trails, At the Sign of the Lost Angel, and Sacrifice. Within months she was carrying her own stories—Deception, Any Port in a Storm—then sparking next to Harold Lloyd in the knock-about comedies Willie’s Haircut (1914) and Just Nuts (1915). Features soon beckoned. At Universal she matched wits with Harry Carey in the serial Graft (1915) and weathered Hobart Bosworth’s Iron Hand (1916). Westerns discovered her surprising steel: William S. Hart directed her in The Tiger Man, Selfish Yates, The Money Corral, Wagon Tracks, and Three Word Brand, and for a time engagement rings were exchanged—until they weren’t. She traded horses and Hart for Tom Mix’s swagger in Treat ’Em Rough (1919). The twenties kept her calendar crowded opposite every stripe of leading man—Charles Ray’s bashful heroes, Sessue Hayakawa’s smoldering villains, Lewis Stone’s urbane professionals, Buck Jones’s saddle-sure cowboys, even Lightning the Dog’s loyal eyes. She and Eva, her equally busy younger sister, shared the frame in The Man Life Passed By (1923). Critics singled out Jane’s aching restraint in Thelma (1922) and the harrowing maternal spiral of The Lullaby (1924). Sound stole her starring roles; after billing six in Redskin (1929) she waited seven years before resurfacing as a hard-edged gun moll in Ghost Town (1936). Bit parts—often unbilled but indelible—followed in Foreign Correspondent, Gallant Lady, Desert Fury, Thelma Jordon, The Furies, and, finally, About Mrs. Leslie (1954). Wise property investments had fattened her purse until October 1929 flattened it. She reinvented herself again in 1974 with Harper & Row’s Treasury of Chicken Cookery, a bright, chatty guide that kept her name in print. Eva died of pneumonia in 1988 at the Motion Picture Country Hospital; Jane, struck by a stroke two years later, slipped away there as well, one month past her 94th birthday.