Mayme Kelso

Biography

Columbus, Ohio, greeted a winter baby on 28 February 1867: Mayme Kelso, who grew up to glide from Midwestern quietude to silent-film spotlights. Audiences remember her razor-sharp timing in the 1925 mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate, her regal fragility in Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female (1919), and the comic sparkle she lent to 1922’s Clarence. After three decades of bright lights, she settled into the shade of South Pasadena, California, where she died on 5 June 1946, leaving behind a reel of memories that still flicker.