A few words on the brief career of Hope Hampton (Mae Elizabeth Hampton,1897-1982).
Hampton was a Philadelphia beauty pageant queen who was spotted by pioneering producer Jules Brulatour while working as an extra in Maurice Tourneur’s Woman (1918). At the time, Brulatour was president of Kodak, but still managing the career of stage and screen star (and Titanic survivor) Dorothy Gibson. He and Gibson divorced in 1919, and Tourneur took Hampton on as his next project. She starred in around a dozen features through the end of the silent era; most of them are now lost. The first was the eyebrow raising A Modern Salome (1920). The following year he bought her a five story Park Avenue townhouse, naming it the Tour Hope Hampton (Hope Hampton Tower). The pair was legally married in 1923.
By 1922, she was co-starred with famous movie stars in most of her vehicles, which included The Light in the Dark (1922) with Lon Chaney, Lawful Larceny (1923) with Conrad Nagel, the original version of The Gold Diggers (1923), The Truth About Women (1924) with Lowell Sherman, The Price of a Party (1924) with Harrison Ford, Fifty-Fifty (1925) with Lionel Barrymore and Louise Glaum, Lovers’ Island (1925) with James Kirkwood, and The Unfair Sex (1926) with Holbrook Blinn and Nita Naldi.
In 1927 Hampton starred in a couple of silent shorts, but sound was coming in and the business would soon be changing. That same year she starred on Broadway in an operetta called My Princess, with Luis Alberni, Robert Woolsey, Donald Meek, and the Albertina Rasch Dancers. It may have been a strategy for adjusting to talkies (many silent stars did that), but instead she chose to follow in the dainty footsteps of her predecessor Dorothy Gibson by pursuing a full fledged opera career. She returned to the screen in a starring roles just once, in The Road to Reno (1938), opposite Randolph Scott.
The opera career proved short-lived, but there were compensations. She reinvented herself as a New York society matron, nicknamed “The Duchess of Park Avenue”, throwing lavish parties, and frequently seen at openings and cultural events. Brulatour remained by her side until the end of his life in 1946. Hampton returned to the screen one last time in a cameo in the 1961 youth film Let’s Twist with Joey Dee.
For more on silent film please see Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.
(Travalanche) 
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