Date of Birth : Mar 27th 1889
Gloria Swanson may not have been the world’s best actress, but she was certainly one of the screen’s greatest personalities. The daughter of a peripatetic army officer, she was educated in public schools from Chicago to Puerto Rico. While visiting Chicago’s Essanay studios in 1913, the 15-year-old Swanson was hired as an extra and it was in this capacity that she met her first husband, Wallace Beery, then starred in the studio’s Sweedie comedies. Not long after making a brief appearance in Charlie Chaplin’s first Essanay starrer His New Job (1915), she accompanied her husband to Hollywood, where he’d been signed by Mack Sennett’s Keystone studios. Often teamed with diminutive leading man Bobby Vernon, Swanson earned a measure of fame as the deadpan heroine of such comedies as Teddy at the Throttle (1916) and The Pullman Bride (1916) (she later claimed that she had no sense of humor at the time and thus played her roles seriously, which made them all the funnier to the audience).
CAREER
Sunset Boulevard ( 1950 )
