Margaret Shelby

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Margaret Shelby
Margaret Shelby

Margaret Shelby, born Margaret Reilly, also known as Alma M. Fillmore, (June 16, 1900 – December 21, 1939) was an American stage and motion picture actress, daughter of actress Charlotte Shelby, older sister of silent film star Mary Miles Minter and one of many public figures noted in the scandals which followed the murder of William Desmond Taylor in 1922.

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[edit] Film career

Margaret was a successful child actress who began working professionally at a very early age. Her first Broadway appearance was in Grace Livingston Furniss's play The Fibber. In 1916 Shelby and sister Mary Miles Minter, by then in their teens, acted together on film in Director James Kirkwood's picture Faith. Although pretty [1] and noted as having some talent as an actress her film career was mostly limited to supporting roles in some of her sister's films. By 1916 both sisters were quite famous. That year, Margaret and Mary established a widely publicized "hotel" for stray dogs on the ample grounds of their Santa Barbara, California home.

[edit] Marriages, family disputes and death

Her sister left the film industry in 1924 and Margaret subsequently took small bit parts in sundry productions.[2] She was briefly married to Hugh Fillmore, grandson of US President Millard Fillmore but they divorced in 1927. With the coming of talkies in the late 1920s her career ended. By the late 1930s Margaret was suffering from both alcoholism and clinical depression. In March 1937 she eloped to Yuma, Arizona with Emmett J. Flynn but this marriage was annulled a month later (April 27, 1937) and Flynn died the following June.

On June 5, 1937 Margaret filed a lawsuit against her mother alleging financial mismanagement, claiming Shelby had stolen $48,750 (roughly almost $2 million in 2007 inflation-adjusted terms) from a safety deposit box in a Los Angeles, California bank. A jury awarded her $20,000.[3] On September 13, 1938 she publicly accused her mother of having killed William Desmond Taylor in 1922 (Taylor had a romance with her sister Mary which had begun in 1919). Margaret Shelby died of alcohol related illness in 1939.

[edit] See also

Ella Margaret Gibson

[edit] References

[edit] Filmography

  • Billie (film)|Billie (1912)
  • Faith (film)|Faith (1916)
  • Peggy Leads the Way (1917)
  • Her Country's Call (1917)
  • Environment (film)|Environment (1917)
  • Wives and Other Wives (1918)
  • Rosemary Climbs the Heights (1918)
  • A Bachelor's Wife (1919)
  • The Intrusion of Isabel (1919)
  • The Amazing Impostor (1919)
  • Jenny Be Good (1920)
  • Clothes Make the Woman (1928)

[edit] External links