GERALDINE FARRAR

Geraldine Farrar was an actress and opera singer from the 1900s to the 1920s. She was a major opera star at the Metropolitan Opera from 1906 to 1922. Cecil B. DeMille was a big fan of hers and put her in some of his early movies, starting, not surprisingly, with Carmen. She made 15 movies in all between 1915 and 1920, and of course, because of the movies were silent, the audiences could not hear her singing! She married her sometimes co-star Lou Tellegen in 1916, but they divorced in 1923, after she retired from both movies and opera singing (11 years later, he committed suicide with a pair of scissors). Some of her movies include: Carmen, Joan the Woman, The Woman God Forgot, The Bonds That Tie, and Flame of the Desert. She passed away in 1967 at the age of 85.