Lillian Drew

Biography

Chicago, 1886: a restless girl with a velvet voice grew up to light the city’s stages as Lillian Drew. By 1905 she was the spark in musical comedies, trading lines and glances across the footlights with her husband, leading man E. H. Calvert. When movies called, she slipped from footlight flare to silver-screen glow, signing with Essanay and earning the nickname “Lily of the Essanay.” In 1913 she stepped before the camera for the first time as Edith Towne in The Broken Heart beside Ruth Stonehouse; ninety-plus pictures later she was still impossible to ignore. Her most lasting ripple came in 1915: Elvira, the scheming socialite opposite Gloria Swanson in The Fable of Elvira and Farina and the Meal Ticket. The camera loved her dark hair and quicker wit, but the pace of reel life took its toll. In 1920 a breakdown slammed the brakes on her career; three years passed before she braved one final set, playing in Jerome Storm’s Children of Jazz (1923) at Famous Players alongside Ricardo Cortez. While recovering from a car wreck and a fractured marriage, she checked into a Chicago hotel. On a snow-dusted February night in 1924, Veronal slipped her into an endless sleep. She was thirty-eight; the coroner logged the overdose as accident, not farewell.