Marie Prevost

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Marie Prevost (November 8, 1898 - January 23, 1937) was a Canadian-born actress of the early days of cinema.

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Early Life

Born Mary Bickford Dunn in Sarnia, Ontario, when still a child her family moved first to Denver, Colorado and then later to Los Angeles, California. While working as a secretary, she applied and obtained an acting job at the Hollywood studio owned by Mack Sennett. Himself from a small Canadian town outside of Montreal, Sennett dubbed her as the exotic French girl, adding Mary Dunn to his collection of bathing beauties under the stage name of Marie Prevost.

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Career Rise

One of her first publicly successful film roles came in the 1920 romantic film Love, Honor, and Behave opposite another newcomer and Sennett protegé, George O'Hara. Initially cast in numerous minor comedic roles as the sexy, innocent young girl, she worked in several films for Sennett's studio until 1921 when she signed with Universal Studios. At Universal, Marie Prevost was still relegated to light comedies and after making only eight films she left to sign with Warner Brothers in 1922.

It was there that she got her first big break appearing in a standout role in the F. Scott Fitzgerald story, The Beautiful and Damned. Her performance brought good reviews and director Ernst Lubitsch chose her for a major role opposite Adolphe Menjou in 1924's The Marriage Circle. Of her performance as the beautiful seductress, Ernst Lubitsch said that she was one of the few actresses in Hollywood who knew how to underplay comedy to achieve the maximum effect.

This impressive performance, praised by the New York Times, resulted in Lubitsch casting her in Three Women in 1924 and in Kiss Me Again the following year. But, just when her career was blossoming, tragedy struck her family again in 1926. While her mother was traveling in Florida with actress Vera Steadman and another Canadian friend, Hollywood studio owner, Al Christie, an automobile accident took her mother's life.

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Decline

Devastated, the loss of her only remaining parent led to an addiction to alcohol and to Marie Prevost's own ultimate destruction. Married to actor Kenneth Harlan since 1924, that marriage soon ended in a 1927 divorced.

Prevost tried to get past her personal torment by burying herself in her work, becoming one of the busiest actresses of the day, starring in numerous roles as the temptingly beautiful seductress who in the end was always the honorable heroine.

However, her depression caused her to binge on food resulting in significant weight gain. By the 1930s she was working less and less being offered only secondary parts, frequently in humiliating roles as a cheap-talking floozy.

As a result of all this, her financial income declined and her growing dependency on alcohol added to her weight problems. By 1934, she had no work at all and her financial situation deteriorated dramatically. The downward spiral became greatly aggravated when her weight problems forced her into repeated crash dieting in order to keep whatever bit part a movie studio offered.

At the age of 38, secluded and hiding away from the world, living alone in an apartment house, Marie Prevost died from a combination of alcoholism and her self-imposed malnutrition. Her body was not discovered for days, and the police report stated that her pet dachshund "had chewed up her arms and legs in a futile attempt to awaken her." Her pauper's burial place is unknown to this day.

After having performed in 105 films Marie Prevost has now been honored with a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6201 Hollywood Blvd.

On his 1978 album "Jesus of Cool," released in the US as "Pure Pop for Now People," British rocker Nick Lowe related Marie Prevost's sad tale in the song "Marie Provost," a bouncy little ditty with rather gruesome lyrics. Along with changing her last name slightly, the song has Marie coming from New York instead of Canada. It includes the immortal line "She was a winner that became the doggie's dinner." The line comes from the caption of a photo of Prevost's corpse in situ (with dog bites) published in Kenneth Anger's exposé Hollywood Babylon. The book is also the source of Lowe's erroneous biographical information on Prevost.

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Films

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External links

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