Edythe Chapman

Edythe Chapman, a stage actress who became one of the silent screen's most familiar mothers and was billed in the 1920s as "Hollywood's Mother," died in Glendale, California, on October 15, 1948. She had turned eighty-five one week earlier. She was born in Rochester, New York, on October 8, 1863. She took to the stage as a young woman and was working in New York by 1898, when she appeared in The Charity Ball. While acting with a stock company in Cincinnati she met its leader, the actor-manager James Neill, and they married in 1897. For years the couple toured together, playing leads in the stock and road companies that brought theater to American towns before motion pictures took over. Around 1909 they came west to the young film colony in Hollywood. Both found steady work, and both became part of Cecil B. DeMille's company of players. She appeared in DeMille's The Little American in 1917, Manslaughter in 1922 and the first version of The Ten Commandments in 1923, the biblical epic that helped define Hollywood spectacle. As she grew older, studios came to rely on her for warm and dignified maternal roles. She played Ma Jones in the 1925 film of Lightnin', alongside Will Rogers, and Grandmother Janeway in Man Crazy in 1927. Her generation of actors carried the craft of the nineteenth-century stage into the new medium, and her quiet presence lent weight to many pictures whose stars drew the headlines. Late in the silent era she had a large part in Navy Blues in 1929, and her last film was Double Crossroads in 1930. James Neill died in 1931, and she lived out her remaining years in Southern California. She died after a brief illness and was buried beside her husband at Bonaventure Cemetery. The photographs of her early stage career survive in theatrical collections, and her films remain a window on the years when Hollywood was learning how to tell stories on screen.