Marie Leonard

Biography

Hackney, 18 June 1886: the curtain rose on Marie Leonard’s life long before footlights ever caught her face. Within a decade she had stepped from London streets into the flickering dawn of British cinema, bewitching early audiences as the lovesick gypsy in *After the Ball*, the fearless adventuress of *The Pride of Jennico*, and the mythic beauty of *Niobe*—all released in the single breathless year of 1914–15. Off-screen she wrote her own romantic plot twice: first as Mrs. Percival Milton Chandler, later as Mrs. William Newbold Langtree. The final reel unspooled on 2 July 1965 in the quiet Pennsylvania countryside of Pennsbury Township, Chester County, where the credits rolled on a life that had helped invent the very language of film.