Marie Doro

Marie Doro, a delicate, dark-eyed actress who starred on Broadway and in silent pictures before quietly walking away from fame, died in New York City on October 9, 1956. She was seventy-four. She was born Marie Katherine Stewart in Duncannon, Pennsylvania, on May 25, 1882, and grew up partly in Carlisle. She was musical from childhood, and her first stage work came in musical comedies at the turn of the century. Her gift for wistful, wide-eyed parts soon caught the eye of the producer Charles Frohman, who made her one of his stars. She played in The Billionaire, then in Clyde Fitch's comedies, and in 1905 traveled to London, where she appeared opposite William Gillette in Sherlock Holmes. One of the boys in that company, playing the page Billy, was a teenage Charlie Chaplin, who later wrote fondly of how smitten he had been with her. She was a leading lady on Broadway for more than a decade, in plays such as The Morals of Marcus, Electra and Diplomacy, and toured widely. When the movies came calling in 1915 she signed with Famous Players, making pictures including The Morals of Marcus, The Wood Nymph and an early screen version of Oliver Twist, in which she played Oliver. She filmed in England and Italy at the end of the decade and returned to the stage for a few more productions. Then she largely withdrew. She never married, spent long periods in Europe, studied religion and literature, and lived her last years privately in New York. The newspapers that had once followed her every opening noted her death briefly. Her photographs, preserved in the Library of Congress, still show the gaze that held a theater audience in the years before the First World War, an era of American stage history she helped define.