Peggy Hyland

Biography

Birmingham, 1884: a restless girl with ink-dark curls is christened Peggy Hyland. Convent classrooms in England and across the Channel try to tame her, but by 1910 she has traded Latin verbs for footlights and is earning her living on the stage. Four years later she steps in front of a camera for Percy Nash’s ‘In the Rank’, a Neptune release that lets audiences discover the new English star opposite Gregory Scott. Between 1916 and 1920 Peggy crosses the Atlantic and becomes a familiar face to American moviegoers, turning out pictures for Fox, Vitagraph and Famous Players at break-neck speed. Her carousel of comedies and melodramas peaks in 1919 with ‘The Merry-Go-Round’, a Fox frolic that pairs her with Jack Mulhall and still turns up in retrospectives of silent Hollywood. Homesick, she sails back to Britain and slips into the role of Aline in the Samuelson Film Company’s 1921 adaptation of ‘Mr. Pim Passes By’. Not content simply to act, she grabs the reins in 1922, writing, producing, directing and headlining the breezy featurette ‘With Father’s Help’. A year later she returns to American soil for ‘Shifting Sands’, a photoplay overseen by her then-husband Fred Leroy Granville; the marriage unravels soon after the premiere, but the film survives as another credit on her crowded résumé. 1924 finds her both in front of and behind the lens again, guiding and starring in the suspense yarn ‘The Haunted Pearls’. Short comic gems shot in England round out her creative streak, but the curtain is already falling: her final appearance comes in 1925’s smugglers’ tale ‘Forbidden Cargoes’. After that she trades spotlights for a quieter life, outliving the silents by nearly five decades and dying in 1973, aged 88, leaving behind a filmography of more than 45 features and a reputation as one of the era’s most versatile women filmmakers.