page_title: Grace Cunard
section_title: Continuing collaboration with Ford, 1914-1917
hierarchical_section_title: Grace Cunard / Film career / Continuing collaboration with Ford, 1914-1917
caption_attribution_description: English: Screenshot of illustration in article "Favorite Pets of Favorite Players" from August 1915 issue of Picture-Play Weekly, pp. 26-27, showing actress-screenwriter-director Grace Cunard petting a lioness in its enclosure at the Universal Ranch in California; original caption to this image reads, "Grace Cunard and one of her animal friends. Miss Cunard is the only person who could approach this lioness. A keeper was killed when he entered the cage with it."
context_page_description: Grace Cunard was an American actress, screenwriter, and film director. During the silent era, she starred in over 100 films, wrote or co-wrote at least 44 of those productions, and directed no fewer than eight of them. In addition, she edited many of her films, including some of the shorts, serials, and features she developed in collaboration with Francis Ford. Her younger sister, Mina Cunard, was also a film actress.
context_section_description: Cunard and Ford continued their collaboration throughout 1914, releasing an array of two-reel historical dramas, Westerns, comedies, and mysteries. A few examples from that year are The Mad Hermit, The Fall of '64, Won in the First, The Mysterious Leopard Lady, and Washington at Valley Forge. Turning to a more ambitious project, they developed for Universal in 1914 and also co-starred in the 15-episode serial Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery. That production's enormous success is reflected in the box-office receipts it generated. Costing only $30,000 or $2,000 per episode to make, the Lucille Love series eventually grossed what was then a staggering return in ticket sales: $1,500,000. The financial success of Lucille Love inspired the Ford-Cunard partnership to release between their ongoing shorts three more serials for Universal over the next two years: the 22-episode The Broken Coin (1915), the 15-episode The Adventures of Peg o' the Ring (1916), and the 16-episode The Purple Mask (1916-1917).
  Cunard’s collaboration with Ford continued into 1917, the same year she married for the second time, not to Ford but to the Irish-born actor Joe Moore. Although the media had referred to her as "Miss" since she began working with Ford in 1912, Cunard had married earlier that same year in New York before moving to California. That first marriage appears to have been short-lived and ended, if not legally, for all practical purposes by the time she arrived on the West Coast. Nevertheless, Cunard’s collaboration with Ford finally ended after June 1917 with the release of In Treason's Grasp, a five-reeler he directed for Renowned Pictures and in which she co-starred with him.
caption: Publicity photograph of Cunard at Universal Ranch with lioness that reportedly "later attacked and killed her trainer", August 1915
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