page_title: Olive Thomas
section_title: Silent films
hierarchical_section_title: Olive Thomas / Career / Silent films
caption_attribution_description: English: Olive Thomas in the film Out Yonder (1919).
context_page_description: Olive Thomas was an American silent-film actress, art model, and photo model.
  Thomas began her career as an illustrator's model in 1914, and moved on to the Ziegfeld Follies the following year. During her time as a Ziegfeld girl, she also appeared in the more risqué show The Midnight Frolic. In 1916, she began a successful career in silent films and would appear in more than 20 features over the course of her four-year film career. That year she also married actor Jack Pickford, the younger brother of fellow silent-film star Mary Pickford.
  On September 10, 1920, Thomas died in Paris five days after ingesting her husband's syphilis medication, mercury dichloride, that brought on acute nephritis. Although her death was ruled accidental, news of her hospitalization and subsequent death were the subject of speculation in the press. Thomas' death has been cited as one of the first heavily publicized Hollywood scandals.
context_section_description: In July 1916, Thomas signed with the International Film Company. She made her on-screen debut in "Episode 10" of Beatrice Fairfax, a film serial. In 1917, she made her full-length feature debut in A Girl Like That for Paramount Pictures.
  That same year, she signed with Triangle Pictures. Shortly after, news broke of her engagement to actor Jack Pickford, whom she had married a year prior. Thomas and Pickford, who was the younger brother of Mary Pickford, kept the marriage secret because Thomas did not want people to think her success in film was due to her association with the Pickfords. Her first film for Triangle, Madcap Madge, was released in June 1917. Thomas' popularity at Triangle grew with performances in Indiscreet Corrine (1917) and Limousine Life (1918). In 1919, she portrayed a French girl who poses as a boy in Toton the Apache. Thomas later said that she felt her work in Toton was "the first real thing I've ever done." She made her final film for Triangle, The Follies Girl, that same year.
  After leaving Triangle, Thomas signed with Myron Selznick's Selznick Pictures Company in December 1918 for a salary of $2,500 a week. She hoped for more serious roles, believing that with her husband signed to the same company, she would have more influence. Her first film for Selznick, Upstairs and Down (1919), proved successful and established her image as a "baby vamp". She followed with roles in Love's Prisoner and Out Yonder, both in 1919. In 1920, Thomas played a teenage schoolgirl The Flapper, who yearns for excitement beyond her small Florida town. Thomas was the first actress to portray a lead character who was a flapper and the film was the first of its kind to portray the flapper lifestyle. Frances Marion, who wrote the scenario, was responsible for bringing the term into the American vernacular. The Flapper proved to be popular and became one of Thomas' most successful films. On October 4, 1920, Thomas' final film, Everybody's Sweetheart, was released.
caption: Thomas in Out Yonder, 1919
exif: {}