Rhea Mitchell
actress, writer
- Birth name:
- Rhea Ione Mitchell
- Born:
- 1890-12-10, Portland, Oregon, USA
- Died:
- 1957-09-16, Los Angeles, California, USA
- Professions:
- actress, writer
Biography
Rhea Mitchell stepped before the footlights in 1909, a nineteen-year-old Portland stock-company spark who traded live audiences for movie cameras within a few seasons. William S. Hart noticed the intensity behind her calm eyes and cast her repeatedly as the strong-willed foil to his weather-beaten cowboys; together they rode the box-office range until the nation’s taste shifted. In 1916 she gambled on a gaudy cliff-hanger, “The Diamond from the Sky,” only to watch the production collapse after four chapters—still the record for the briefest serial ever attempted. The crash clipped her momentum; she spent the next twenty years slipping from featured player to supporting name, then to fleeting, often-uncredited glimpses. After a final blink-and-miss moment in the early fifties she closed the studio door for good, exchanging screen dreams for keys and ledgers as manager of a modest Los Angeles apartment house. There, in the quiet of her own front room, a resentful servant cut her story short, strangling the former star whose pioneering reel life had flickered out long before.
