Lois Weber

Biography

Before Hollywood had a name, Lois Weber was already preaching—first from a sidewalk in Pennsylvania, then from the bright heart of a silver screen. Converted to cinema in 1905, the former street-corner missionary swapped her Bible for a megaphone and stepped before the camera in 1908 when Herbert Blaché cast her as the naked Truth in *Hypocrites*. Three years later she slipped behind the lens for *A Heroine of ’76*, sharing directorial duties with Edwin S. Porter while doubling as the film’s star; George Washington was played by her collaborator and soon-to-be husband, Phillips Smalley. 1914 was a whirlwind of Sundays: twenty-seven features in twelve months, including the country’s first full-length Shakespeare, *The Merchant of Venice*, co-helmed with Smalley and featuring Jeanie Macpherson among the Venetians. That milestone stamped Weber as the first American woman to pilot a feature picture. Her sermons simply changed venue. Now they unspooled in flickers that tackled abortion, Prohibition, contraception, morphine, and the red-light district—topics polite society whispered, Weber projected forty-feet wide. By 1916 she ruled Universal’s biggest lot, pocketing the fattest paycheck any director—man or woman—had ever cashed. The following year she hung her own shingle: Lois Weber Productions. A century of credits later, the twenties’ shifting tides capsized her studio. Talkies arrived; Weber stayed silent, save for a single vocal experiment—*White Heat* (1934)—before the lights dimmed for good.