Florence Vidor: From Houston to Heifetz

Actress Florence Vidor (Florence Cobb, 1895-1977) was a player in the movie game a scant decade and a half, though that was longer than the marriage to the man whose name she bore, film directed King Vidor. The pair, both from Texas, were married not long before Florence started out at Vitagraph by way of a screen test arranged by friend Corinne Griffith. Her five dozen films include A Tale of Two Cities (1917), Thomas Ince’s Hail the Woman (1921), the original 1923 adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams, the original 1923 adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, the 1923 version of The Virginian, the 1924 screen adaptation of Clyde Fitch’s Barbara Frietchie, and Lubitsch’s The Patriot (1928). Her last film and only talkie was William Wellman’s Chinatown Nights (1929). So impatient was she with the primitive sound recording processes, and the demands of spoken dialogue (which she little experience with) that she walked away from the business.

But she had a pretty cool parachute, I must say. By that point she had married her second husband, who was nother than the world famous violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz. The pair were married from 1926 through 1945.

For more on silent film read  Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.