May Allison
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- For the Canadian long-distance runner see May Allison (athlete)
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May Allison (June 14, 1890 – March 27, 1989) was an American stage and film actress whose greatest success was achieved in the early part of the twentieth century in the medium of silent film.
[edit] Biography
Allison was born in Rising Fawn, Georgia and was the youngest of five siblings to Dr. John S. Allison and Virginia (Wise) Allison.
Allison made her Broadway stage debut in the 1914 production of Apartment 12-K before settling in Hollywood, California in the early days of motion pictures. Allison's screen debut was as an ingenue in the 1915 star-making Theda Bara vehicle A Fool There Was. When Allison was cast that same year opposite actor Harold Lockwood in the Allan Dwan directed romantic film David Harum, audiences quickly became enamored of the onscreen duo and the two began a hugely successful onscreen film collaboration; possibly the first such publicly celebrated "romantic duo" of the silver-screen; although the two actors were never romantically involved offscreen. The pair would go on to star in approximately twenty-five highly successful features together during the World War I era.
Allison and Lockwood's highly popular film romances would end prematurely however, when in 1918 Lockwood died at the age of 31 after contracting Spanish influenza, a deadly epidemic that swept the world from 1917 through 1918 killing between 50 and 100 million people globally. Allison's career then faltered markedly without her popular leading male co-star.
Allison continued to act in films throughout the 1920s, although she never received the same amount of public acclaim as she had achieved when starring opposite Harold Lockwood. Her last film before retiring was 1927's The Telephone Girl opposite Madge Bellamy and Warner Baxter.
In 1920 Allison married writer and actor Robert Ellis, however the couple divorced in 1923. Allison then married Photoplay magazine editor James Quirk, a union that lasted until 1932. Allison's third marriage was to Carl Norton Osborne and that marriage lasted for over forty years until his death in 1982. Her final (fourth) marriage was to Colonel J.L. Stephenson, which ended in divorce shortly afterwards.
In her later years, May Allison spent much of her time at her vacation home in Tucker's Town, Bermuda and was a Patron of the Cleveland Symphony. She died of respiratory failure in Bratenahl, Ohio in 1989 at the age of 98 and laid to rest at the Gates Mills South Cemetery in Gates Mills, Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
