Lillian Brown (1874-1956) appeared in more than 250 films in a career that began in 1910 in Chicago, working with the Selig Polyscope Company. She made her final film in 1937.
Most of Leighton’s pictures were silent (she even provided the stories for some of them in the early years). In the sound era, she tended to be credited in low-budget films, but uncredited in those with bigger budgets.
One such was Call of the Flesh, in which she played the shawl seller.
Lillian Lawrence (dates unknown) is frequently mistaken for Lillian Lawrence (1882-1926), who was a well-known stage actor.
The screen Lawrence was a bit-part character actor between 1924 and 1953, rarely credited in over fifty appearances. The stage Lawrence made occasional screen appearances, with credit, and mostly in the last two years of her life: she played the Mother in Buster Keaton’s Three Ages (1923).
It was the little-known screen Lawrence, of course, who played a nun in Call of the Flesh, her namesake having died four years earlier.
She was in some very good pictures–Footlight Parade (1933), Judge Priest (1934), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Easy Living (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1940)–but always in a very minor role.
IMDb wrongly claims that Ethel Sykes (1906-61) made her screen debut in Into Society and Out (1914). She would have been eight years old at the time, making this unlikely.
Sykes’s actual first film was The Complete Life (1926), a Fox short based on an O Henry story. The busiest period in her career was 1934-35, when she was in seventeen pictures, including the two John M Stahl classics Imitation of Life (1934) and Magnificent Obsession (1935). Most of her appearances were without credit.
Sykes played a chorus girl alongside Marion Davies in The Florodora Girl.
Mary Marie Sittlow (1904-88) appeared in a couple of dozen pictures between 1927 and 1936. She played a couple of leads for minor studios in 1929, but was generally uncredited.
In 1930, Caron played one of the Florodora Girls in The Florodora Girl.
Lenore Konti Teresa Bushman (1913-88) was the daughter of silent star Francis X Bushman, and made her first screen appearance aged 12 in one of her father’s pictures, The Masked Bride (1925).
Aged 17, Bushman played one of Marion Davies’s fellow chorines inThe Florodora Girl.
Her screen career was short and sporadic, and Lenore Bushman made her final film in 1938.
Anita Louise Fremault (1915-70) was one of those rare child performers who went on to an adult career in acting and exhibited no major trauma.
Louise made her debut on Broadway aged seven, making her first film appearance in the same year for an east coast company.
By the mid-thirties, Anita Louise was playing leading roles, perhaps most notably as Titania in Max Reinhardt’s star-studded version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). She was generally the second female lead in the bigger pictures, supporting stars like Olivia de Havilland and Norma Shearer. Her final big screen role was in Joseph H Lewis’s evocatively-titled Retreat, Hell! (1952), but she continued working one-and-off on television until 1970.
In The Florodora Girl, Anita Louise, aged 15, played the hero’s younger sister.
Jane Neave Keithley (1908-44) was a local beauty pageant winner who gave up university to have a go in Hollywood.
After playing a chorus girl for Paramount, and then a small role in Metro’s The Florodora Girl, she changed her name to Jane Keith and secured the lead in Fox’s Jack London adaptation, The Sea Wolf.
Unfortunately, this was a false dawn in her career, and she made only two further appearances. The silver lining, however, was her marriage to the director of The Sea Wolf, Alfred Santell. By all accounts a story relationship, it produced four children, which makes her untimely death at the age of 36 even sadder.
Robert Joseph Edney (1859-1937) was a British actor who relocated to America and made his first films for the Chicago-based Essanay Company.
Bolder eventually took up residence in Los Angeles and, by the end of his career, had made around 120 pictures. He was a regular performer in Wallace Beery’s Sweedie series.
Bolder played the Commodore, a stage doorman, in The Florordora Girl.
Samuel B Hardy (1883-1935) abandoned his studies at Yale to go on the stage, later signing with the Biograph Company in its post-Griffith years to make pictures.
Hardy had a preference for comedy, even though he played Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1918) for Famous Players-Lasky, and in The Miracle Woman (1931) he was the promoter who exploits Barbara Stanwyck’s religious fervour. His best-known role, however, was as the agent Weston in King Kong (1933).
Hardy only appeared in one MGM musical, as the gambler Harry Fountaine in The Florordora Girl.
Hardy was taken ill while shooting a film with his friend Eddie Cantor and did not survive emergency surgery.
Vivian Ruth Andersen (1895-1958) began performing in a vaudeville act with her sister, and later worked on Broadway. She made one film on the east coast in 1915, but her Hollywood career started in 1924.
Oakland did a lot of work for the Hal Roach studio, and at different times played the wife of both Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel. She also played Edgar Kennedy’s wife in a series of shorts. Most of her pictures were shorts and programmers, though Oakland did have a small role in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).
In The Florodora Girl, Oakland was Maud, in a double act with Ilka Chase as Marion Davies’s friends.
