#1 Colleen Moore was born Kathleen Morrison on August 19, 1900, in Port Huron, Michigan. Colleen's father was an irrigation engineer. She was convent-educated and studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory. D.W. Griffith brought her to Hollywood in 1917, returning a favor to her uncle, 'Walter C. Howey , the Chicago Examiner editor who helped him clear The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916) through the censors.
She played leads in B pictures and Westerns, several opposite Tom Mix. The movie which defined her as the inventor of the "flapper" look was Flaming Youth (1923). The year that came out she married the first of her four husbands, Frank McCormick, production of head of First National Pictures, later part of Warner Brothers. By 1927 she was the top box-office attraction in America and making $12,500 a week, much of which she invested in the stock market. She wrote a book on investing and married two stockbrokers.
After she retired she traveled widely, frequently to China. At 83 she married her fourth husband. At the time of her death she was writing a novel, a Hollywood murder mystery centered around a Mae West type. On January 25, 1988, She died of an undisclosed ailment in Paso Robles, California. |
