Alice Terry

Alice Terry
Born	Alice Frances Taaffe (1899-07-29)July 29, 1899 Vincennes, Indiana
Died	December 22, 1987(1987-12-22) (aged 88) Burbank, California
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1916–1933
Spouse(s)	Rex Ingram (1921–1950)

Alice Terry (July 29, 1899 – December 22, 1987) was an American film actress who began her career during the silent film era, appearing in thirty-nine films between 1916 and 1933.

Career

Born Alice Frances Taaffe in Vincennes, Indiana, she made her film debut in 1916 in Not My Sister, opposite Bessie Barriscale and William Desmond Taylor.

This 1921 Vanity Fair caricature by Ralph Barton^[1] shows the famous people who, he imagined, left work each day in Hollywood; use cursor to identify individual figures.

1. ^ Vanity Fair magazine September 1921, accessed 2009

That same year, she played several different characters in the 1916 anti-war film Civilization, co-directed by Thomas H. Ince and Reginald Barker. One of her most acclaimed performances came as "Marguerite" in 1921's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, starring Rudolph Valentino.^[1]

In 1925 her husband co-directed Ben-Hur, filming parts of it in Italy. The two decided to move to the French Riviera, where they set up a small studio in Nice and made several films on location in North Africa, Spain, and Italy for MGM and others. In 1933, Terry made her last film appearance in Baroud, which she also co-directed with husband Rex Ingram.

Personal life

In 1921, she married director Rex Ingram during production of The Prisoner of Zenda (released 1922), which he directed and in which she appeared as Princess Flavia. The couple sneaked away over one weekend, were married in Pasadena, and returned to work promptly the following Monday.^[2]

During the making of The Arab (1924) in Tunisia, they met a street child named Kada-Abd-el-Kader, whom they adopted upon learning that he was an orphan. Allegedly, el-Kader misrepresented his age to make himself seem younger to his adoptive parents, and after he "began associating with fast women and fast cars throughout the San Fernando Valley", Terry and Ingram sent him back to Morocco "to finish school."^[3]

Terry was known to have several gay male friends in the film industry, including Ramón Novarro (a former leading man of hers) and Barry Norton.^[4] During the 1930s, she accompanied Novarro to speakeasies with predominantly gay clientele, allegedly in part to throw off any suspicion about Novarro's homosexuality.^[5]

Terry and Ingram retired together in the 1930s. By all accounts, theirs was a happy marriage, though they often had separate bedrooms during their marriage and occupied separate retirement community bungalows at the end of their marriage.^[6] Nonetheless, they remained together until his death in 1950. After his death, Terry became romantically involved with actor Gerald Fielding, who bore a strong physical resemblance to her late husband.^[7] They were lovers until his death, at the age of forty-six, in 1956.^[8]

Terry had a sister, Edna, who died in 1984.^[9]

Death

Terry died on December 22, 1987 of natural causes, and was interred in the Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Alice Terry has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6628 Hollywood Blvd.

Selected filmography

References

1. ↑ Pratt, George C. (March 1974). ""If You Beat Me, I Wept", Alice Terry Reminisces About Silent Films" (PDF). Image (Rochester, N.Y.: International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House Inc.) 17 (1): 17–22. Retrieved June 15, 2014. 
2. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0855935/bio
3. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0434255/bio
4. ↑ Slide, Anthony; Silent topics: essays on undocumented areas of silent film; p. 48
5. ↑ Soares, Andre; Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro; St. Martin's Press, New York, 2002; p. 158
6. ↑ Slide, Anthony; Silent topics: essays on undocumented areas of silent film; p. 48
7. ↑ Slide, Anthony; Silent topics: essays on undocumented areas of silent film; p. 48
8. ↑ Soares, André; Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro; St. Martin's Press, New York, 2002; p. 303
9. ↑ Soares, André; Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro; St. Martin's Press, New York, 2002; p. 303

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alice Terry.

• Alice Terry at the Internet Movie Database
• Alice Terry at the Women Film Pioneers Project
• Photographs and bibliography