Irene Lucille Marguerite Franklin (1885-1941) was reputedly carried on stage by her parents when she was six months old. Aged six, she appeared in a Broadway production, paving the way for a career in vaudeville, following a spell in British music halls in 1894.
By the 1920s, Franklin was back again on Broadway, both as a performer and songwriter.
In 1929, Franklin was invited to commit part of her vaudeville routine to celluloid in a Vitaphone short. Four years later she acted in the first of around thirty feature films, her roles both credited and uncredited. The lower-status the picture, the more likely she was to have a named character and a credit. Her final screen role was in Fixer Dugan, made for RKO in 1939.
Franklin appeared in just one MGM musical, as the drunken opera singer Lotte Lengel in The Cat and the Fiddle.
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