Lois Meredith

Biography

Lois Meredith’s career began with a single, rowdy night on Broadway. In 1910 her father, a no-nonsense psychologist, shepherded her to “The Girl with the Whooping Cough,” where Valeska Suratt’s comic swagger lit a fuse. By her early teens she had traded classrooms for the Professional Children’s School and was already holding her own beneath the gaslight of 1910s stock companies. Cameras found her in 1914; over the next twenty-three years she flickered through twenty-two features, slipping from vamp to society matron with a raised-eyebrow elegance that silent-era audiences loved. When the Crash silenced studio doors, her voice carried her onto the airwaves—a Depression-era radio staple until she signed off in 1939. Microphones stowed, she turned teacher, sharpening a new generation’s instincts in her drama studio, a demanding mentor whose last class adjourned sometime around 1965.