Mae Murray
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Image:Mae Murray.jpg Mae Murray (May 10, 1889 – March 23, 1965) was an American actress and dancer, who became known as "The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips" [1] and "The Gardenia of the Screen."
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Early Life and Rise to Fame
Born Marie Adrienne Koenig in Portsmouth, Virginia, she first began acting on the Broadway stage in 1906 with dancer Vernon Castle. In 1908, she joined the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies, moving up to headliner by 1915.
Murray became a star of the club circuit in both the United States and Europe, performing with Clifton Webb, Rudolph Valentino, and John Gilbert as some of her many dance partners.
Her motion picture debut was in To Have and to Hold (1916). She became a major star for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, starring with Rudolph Valentino in Delicious Little Devil and Big Little Person in 1919. At the height of her popularity, Mae formed her own production company with her director, John Stahl. Critics were sometimes less than thrilled with Mae's over-the-top costumes and outsized emoting, but her films were financially successful.
Slow Career Decline
Murray's most-famous role was probably in the Erich von Stroheim directed film The Merry Widow (1925), opposite John Gilbert. However, when silent movies gave way to talkies, Murray's voice proved to be not compatible with the new sound, and her career began to fade. Her career was injured even further when her fourth husband, Prince David Mdivani (a Georgian nobleman whose brother, Serge, married Pola Negri), became her manager and suggested that she leave MGM. Eventually, the pair divorced, and Murray lost custody of their son in a bitter court battle. For a brief period of time, Murray wrote a weekly column for newspaper scion William Randolph Hearst.
Retirement
Murray's finances continued to collapse, and for most of her later life she lived in poverty. She wrote a not-particularly-successful autobiography, The Self-Enchanted.
She later moved into the Motion Picture House in Woodland Hills, a retirement community for Hollywood professionals.
Mae Murray died at age 75. She is interred in Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery, North Hollywood, California.