On February 19, 1910, the actress Florence Lawrence found out she was dead in the newspaper, while reading her obituary On his way to work, an outlandish headline announced his tragic end under the wheels of a speeding car. The story was obviously a lie, but it launched Lawrence’s career into a publicity frenzy that made her a star of the silent era.
His name caught on, at a time when most movie actors didn’t even get credit for their on-screen work, they were just anonymous faces. Thus, Lawrence is often called the “first movie star”, and it was all thanks to a fabricated death. He thinks of the montages of couples made for the purpose and other much more naive tricks and compares it to killing an actress.
How to create a movie star
Before his death and resurrection, Lawrence had already starred in over a hundred short films and worked on the vaudeville circuit. She was a worker at American studios like the Vitagraph Company and Biograph, which would end up pulling the works of DW Griffith, where the actress would appear in 1908, in comedies like ‘Mr and Mrs Jones’ from the studio. Her popularity grew and she began to be called “the Biograph girl”, already at that time the names of its actors were not accredited.
This caused her to ask the studio several times to increase her salary, but they fired her, but she was soon hired by Carl Laemmle for the Independent Moving Pictures Company, a smaller studio but with big plans for her signing, trying to capitalize on her popularity with a strategic media blitz and a scandalous climax, dispersing rumors of her death, in versions that said that a tram ran over her.
Laemmle responded with a now famous “correction” that was published in trade journals under the headline “We nailed you a liealong with a photo of Lawrence and a text insisting that the actress was alive and well and about to star in new IMP shows. The Broken Oath and Time-Lock Safe. The Laemmle’s supposed outrage at the lie does not hold up and historians credit him with starting the rumor himself.
The first fan phenomenon
The correction was mostly opportunistic publicity, and to further dispel the death rumors, the IMP sent Lawrence to St. Louis with another studio actor, King Baggott, to make convenient public appearances, receptions, and speeches at various venues around the city. . This resulted in a real fan phenomenon for Lawrence which was confirmed on his visit to Union Station, where passionate people ended up ripping the buttons off his coat and hat.
Lawrence was now officially a celebrity, managing to earn $1,000 a week at IMP, and yet would stay at the studio for less than a year, skipping to another and eventually starting his own production studio, Victor Companywith her husband Harry Solter in 1912, while managing a cosmetics shop and even inventing a precursor to the automobile turn signal, when she wasn’t making movies.
The publicity blow of his death hoax did not last long, and Lawrence’s fame began to wane in the mid-1910s, when he parted ways with Solter and his production company was taken over by Laemmle’s last company, Universal Pictures. As ‘Babylon’ narrates was one of those stars who had a hard time trying to find work transitioning to talkies. In December 1938, she was found dead in her apartment with a note addressed to her roommates: “I’m tired. I hope this works. Goodbye, my dears. They can’t heal me so we’ll leave it at that”. Lawrence was buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, her headstone reads “The first movie star.”
In Espinof | Best silent movies