Though she is little remembered today, silent screen star Carmel Myers had a high-flying career in her heyday and was ranked among the screen's most glamorous and enticing vamps. She was born at the turn of the century in San Francisco, the daughter of immigrant parents. Her father, a rabbi, emigrated from Australia and her mother from Austria. ...
Talking pictures have done a lot of things to this industry, one of the most important being the placement of a value on brains. Brains never mattered before as far as an actor or actress was concerned. But now we must learn our lines.
2
David W. Griffith [D.W. Griffith] had come to Dad and interviewed him concerning some of the historical background for "Intolerance" [Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916)]. One day when I was with Dad I met Mr. Griffith. I had been passing the "Intolerance" sets - the walls of Babylon and all that - almost every day on my way to and from school, and I had taken particular notice of the two stucco or papier mache figures of elephants with their trunks curled up. "They - those elephants - always seem to be beckoning me," I told Mr. Griffith, "saying, 'Come on! Come on!'"
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Fact
1
Myers was a good friend of fellow screen actress Mae Murray and of Murray's husband and producing partner, director Robert Z. Leonard.
2
January 16, 1932: Myers and her maid, Margaret Moore, were robbed in the Myers apartment by two masked gunmen who made off with $20,000 worth of jewels.
3
Was involved in an auto accident in 1931 when the car she was driving, lent by theatrical agent Milton C. Bren, overturned. Myers sustained cuts to the face, a broken wrist and a broken arm, and sued Bren for $50,000.
4
Dabbled in poetry. Her other hobbies included swimming, tennis and chess.
$14 Million
