Olive Carey was born Olive Fuller Golden on January 31, 1896. Olive was 18 when she appeared in her first motion picture, a silent entitled, Tess of the Storm Country (1914). After she made A Knight of the Range (1916), she retired from films. In 1916, she married actor Harry Carey who was eighteen years older. They had two children, one of whom ...
Olive's father, George Fuller Golden, was one of the founders of The White Rats of America, the first American union of vaudeville artists in 1900. It took its name from the British guild, The Water Rats ("Rats" being "Star" backwards).
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Sent a young GM Junior Executive to friends in the film industry for a screen test. She was notified some weeks later that the young man, although handsome, intelligent, well spoken and photogenic, would not be usable as an actor. Reason: He had a strange walk that was not correctable. Olive persisted in her backing of this young man, Marion Morrison, and he went on to become the legendary actor, John Wayne. The Duke never forgot Olive's kindness. Not only did the two become life-long friends, but he made provisions to have Olive and her husband, Harry, as extras in all his big movies. After Harry Carey's death, Olive continued to work as an extra in all Wayne's movies.
For her work in Trader Horn (1931), for which she spent several weeks in primitive, dangerous and unhealthy conditions in East Africa, Carey was paid the grand sum of $300 by MGM, making her very angry. Upon returning to the US she, along with the rest of the cast, was promptly fired by MGM, which had decided to shelve the picture. However, several weeks later the studio decided to try to save the film, and called back the original cast, all of whom were under contract to MGM--except Olive Carey. Told that she would be needed for five days and would be paid the standard $300 fee, Carey demanded a salary of $1000 a day. MGM eventually gave in, as they needed her to match the footage that had previously been shot in Africa, and paid what she asked. She told a friend that she would have normally done the reshoot for the regular contract fee, except that she saw a chance to get back at studio head Louis B. Mayer for "dumping me in the middle of Africa, paying me nothing, then bringing me back home and firing me." This feat won her the reputation of being one of the few people in Hollywood to beat Mayer at his own game.
$19 Million
