Naomi Childers
actress
- Birth name:
- Naomi Weston Childers
- Born:
- 1892-11-15, Pottstown, Pennsylvania, USA
- Died:
- 1964-05-09, Hollywood, California, USA
- Professions:
- actress
Biography
A Pennsylvania furnace town—Pottstown—supplied the world with Naomi Childers on 15 November 1892. Two dozen years later she slipped into the 1914 Ziegfeld Follies chorus line, trading hometown soot for footlights and a camera lens. Between 1914 and 1919 the reels spun nineteen times with her name in the cast: Mr. Barnes of New York ushered her onto screens first, The Dust of Egypt trailed sand after in 1915, Fathers of Men staked moral ground in 1916, and The World and Its Woman closed the silent sprint in 1919. When the twenties arrived, the offers cooled: only eight pictures from 1920 to 1924 while busier players logged that many in a single season. Sound stages found her again in 1934; for the next dozen years she slipped into twenty-three more films, her voice now as marketable as her profile. The circle completed itself when she surfaced in MGM’s 1945 revue Ziegfeld Follies, age fifty-four, smiling at the same title that had once launched her. Hollywood kept her until the end: she died there quietly on 9 May 1964, seventy-one candles burned down.
