Helen Jerome Eddy
Helen Jerome Eddy (February 25, 1897 – January 27, 1990) was a motion picture actress from New York City. She was noted as a character actress who played genteel heroines in films such as "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" (1917). Early years. Eddy was born in New York City on February 25, 1897, and was raised in Los Angeles, California. As a youth, she acted in productions put on by the Pasadena Playhouse. She became interested in films through the studio of Siegmund Lubin, which was based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In her youth they opened a backlot in her  Los Angeles neighborhood. Career. Lubin's studio rejected a scenario that Eddy wrote at age 17, "but decided to capitalize on her face", using her in vamp roles in "lurid melodramas". Eddy's first movie was "The Discontented Man" (1915). Soon after, she left Lubin and joined Paramount Pictures. At this time she began to play the roles for which she is best remembered. Other films in which the actress participated include "The March Hare" (1921), "The Dark Angel", "Camille", "Quality Street", "The Divine Lady" (1929) and the first "Our Gang" talkie "Small Talk" (1929). She made "Girls Demand Excitement  in 1931 and her final film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", in 1947. Even as a seasoned performer in the late 1920s it was remarked that Eddy looked "astonishingly young in appearance to have been in pictures for so many years". Eddy thrived on playing varied characters and said, "Italian women, French, Turkish, girls of the Bowery, kitchenmaids — they're all in the day's work". Dissatisfaction with her salary led Eddy to retire from her film career. Later years and death. After she retired from films, Eddy worked in real estate in Pasadena. She acted in some local  productions, including playing religious characters in plays at the Pilgrimage Theater in Hollywood Hills. Eddy died of heart failure on January 27, 1990, at the Episcopal Home in Alhambra, California, at the age of 92.