EVELYN NESBIT

Evelyn Nesbit was an artist's model and chorus girl from the 1890s who also acted from the 1900s to the 1930s. She was the woman at the center of the 1906 murder of architect Stanford White (her mentally ill husband murdered White, who had groomed and sexually assaulted Nesbit before her marriage; because his family was rich and powerful, he was put in a mental institution for a short while and later released). After the murder, and the huge publicity it received, Nesbit dropped her husband's name and made a series of movies, and most of them were where she played a fallen woman of one sort or another! Two movies were based on the sensational part of her life (The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing in 1955 with Joan Collins, and part of the movie Ragtime in 1981 with Elizabeth McGovern). Evelyn Nesbit passed away in 1967 at the age of 82.