Olive Carey

Biography

Olive Carey entered the world as Olive Fuller Golden on January 31, 1896, and before she was old enough to vote she had already faced a camera—storming through the 1914 silent Tess of the Storm Country at eighteen. Two years later she rode across A Knight of the Range (1916), then abruptly traded flickering close-ups for wedding rings, marrying veteran actor Harry Carey, eighteen years her senior. Their union produced two children, including Harry Carey Jr., who would grow up to carve his own legend on-screen. The cameras stayed quiet around Olive for fifteen years until Trader Horn (1931) lured her back for a single safari. After another brief fling with 1935’s Naughty Marietta, she slipped away again—this time for more than a decade. Widowhood in 1947 pulled her back into the klieg lights for good: Air Hostess (1949) marked her re-launch, and she kept resurfacing in pictures, sometimes after long pauses, sometimes in quick succession, until the outrageous 1966 romp Billy the Kid Versus Dracula recorded her final bow at age 70. On March 13, 1988, Olive drew her last breath in Carpinteria, California, closing a 92-year story that had flickered, faded, and flared again more times than a mischievous reel of nitrate.