Grace Cunard

At 73 years old, Grace Cunard has this physical status:

Grace Cunard (born April 8, 1893 – January 19, 1967) was an American actress, screenwriter, and film producer.

Mina Cunard, an actress, was her sister.

Early life and stage work

Harriet Jeffries, an Ohio native, was the elder of two daughters of Ohio natives Washington and Lola (née Longshore) Jeffries, who died in 1893. According to the federal census of 1900, seven-year-old Harriet, her younger sister Armina (Mina), and their parents were still living in Columbus, where Washington helped the family by serving as a grocery clerk. Harriet completed her formal education in Columbus but left school in the eighth grade, presumably to devote all of her time to an acting career. When and where she was introduced to theatre in the United States is uncertain; however, by 1906, the future film star was already acting in local stage productions such as Dora Thorne, East Lynne, and then in New York in Princess of Patches. In "Before the Stars Shone," an article in the New York-based trade monthly Picture Play Magazine, Grace Cunard's (Harriet Jeffries') entry into acting is briefly discussed. "Grace Cunard, who was still young, pleaded for a stage life until her mother took her to a manager who gave her the title role in 'Dora Thorne,'" the staff writer Al Ray's blog informs his readers. Her other early stage appearances included trips with stock companies to theatres in Cleveland and St. Louis, as well as appearances in vaudeville in various cities.

Personal life and death

Cunard was married three times. She married actor Harry Harvey, who was 20 years her senior, in New York on April 30, 1912, when she was 19 years old. The marriage ended before 1917, but the reasons for its dissolution are vague. Joe Moore, an Irish-born actor, was the subject of her next marriage. They married at Seal Beach, California, on January 17, 1917, but eight years later, they divorced. Cunard married Frederick Lorenzo Tyler, a film stuntman who professionally used the name Jack Tyler Shannon, on September 1, 1925. They were married for more than 40 years before her death from cancer in 1967. She was residing at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, a Los Angeles suburb, at the time of her death. Her gravesite is also in Los Angeles, at Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth's neighborhood.

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Film career

Harriet is most likely that she was already using the term Grace Cunard when she first began filming in 1908. Cunard says after one of her "stock performances" a friend told her one evening at dinner encouraged her to try "canned drama," a slang term used in the theatre community to describe motion pictures. She accepted the challenge and "in the spirit of fun" went to the Biograph Company on East 14th Street in Manhattan and "worked for a day's salary to see what it was like." She loved the experience so much that she began filming, but it began with small uncredited parts. Over the next three years, she had appeared in better roles at Biograph and other studios based in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Kalem Studios, Edison, the American subsidiary of Pathé, Republic, and Lubin were among the other businesses that were among those others.

Cunard, who worked in Eastern companies, moved to California in 1912 to work in the rapidly expanding film industry. She was first hired by "fledgling producer" Thomas H. Ince at Bison Studio, where director and actor Francis Ford portrayed her as the wife of General George Armstrong Custer's Last Fight in two-reel military drama Custer's Last Fight. Ince fired her after she had fought Ford's company to work somewhere else in Bison after she was a high-profile participant in that launch. Ford, enraged by her care, brought Bison and his crew and players, including Cunard, to Universal Pictures. And others, the Belle of Yorktown, 1913-1913 She continued to act and collaborate with Ford in other two-reel shorts such as The Black Masks, From Dawn to Dark, From Dawn to President, and others. Many moviegoers mistook the couple for married as a result of their close professional relationship, which had quickly developed into a personal one as well. The two artists were increasingly being referred to in trade journals and newspapers as the "Ford-Cunard"'s production team, with Francis being lauded regularly for directing and both of them being praised as "unusually promising screen artists."

Grace was already in the press for her writing, including references to her "novels" and several screenplays by 1914. The She Wolf, a Ford-Cunard two-reeler film that was released by Bison Pictures late 1913, was one of a series of films in the period that concentrated on Cunard's writing. She Wolf, a "photoplay" about an evil woman, a "wrecker of men's hearts and reputations," circulated around the country and by May 1914, Phoenix, Arizona, was officially recognized as a "photoplay" for an evil woman, a "weacker of men's hearts and reputations." "One of the most fascinating and moving pictures ever seen at the Regale theater ever shown at the Regale theater," The Arizona Republican, the state's most respected newspaper, has announced. "She Wolf" by Francis Ford has portrayed Grace Cunard's classic book, 'She Wolf,' and Miss Cunard appears in the moving picture version of the tale.

Cunard and Ford continued their collaboration throughout 1914, releasing a number of two-reel historical dramas, Westerns, comedies, and mysteries. A few examples from this year include: The Mad Hermit, The Fall of '64, Won in the First, The Mysterious Leopard Lady, and Washington at Valley Forge. They created Universal in 1914 and co-starred in Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery, a 15-episode serial. The production's popularity is shown by the box-office receipts it generated. The Lucille Love series, which costing only $30,000 or $2,000 per episode to produce, has since earned what was then a record-breaking return in ticket sales: $1,500,000 ($40,580,000 today). Lucille Love's financial success prompted the Ford-Cunard partnership to be released between three of their remaining shorts three more serials for Universal over the next two years: the 22-episode The Adventures of Peg (1916), and the 16-episode The Purple Mask (1916-1917)

Cunard's partnership with Ford lasted into 1917, the second year she married for the second time, not to Ford but to Irish-born actor Joe Moore. Despite the fact that the media had referred to her as "Miss" since she first joined Ford in 1912, Cunard married in New York earlier this year before heading to California. That first marriage appears to have been short-lived and ended, if not legally, for all practical purposes by the time she landed on the West Coast. Despite this, Cunard's relationship with Ford came to an end in June 1917 with the publication of In Treason's Grasp, a five-reeler he directed for Renowned Pictures and in which she co-starred with him.

It was not unprecedented for members of set and post-production to undertake a variety of additional duties outside of their primary roles at the time Cunard began working in film. Cunard was no exception. Although it is now well established that a significant number of the "pioneers" of early American filmmaking were women, it was also not common for a young actress with an eighth-grade education to write, act, direct, and edit films in the manner Cunard did, with some of them doing both writing, produce, direct, and edit films in the 1910s. The number of silent films in which she appeared differed in film terms. Her entry in the 2005 edition of The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema honors her for her role in over 100 silent films, writing screenplays, or treatments for 44 of those titles, as well as directing at least eight of them on her own and more in concert with Ford. Some period newspapers and trade journals honor her for writing between 150 and 200 "photoplays," while one newspaper in 1915 revealed she had authored 400 stories, a highly implausible figure considering how long Cunard had been active in motion pictures by then. Whatever the real figures, news items, and reviews of her films, they all agree that her output was uneventful, particularly between 1913 and 1918.

Richard Willis interviewed Cunard for the July issue of Motion Picture Magazine in 1915, asking the 22-year-old actress about the various aspects of filmmaking and which of those tasks she enjoyed the most:

The fan magazine Photoplay published a feature article about the "king and queen of movie melodrama" a year after the preceding interview with Cunard. Both Ford and Cunard were interviewed in the story, titled "Her Grace and Francis I." "Most freely admits" that Miss Cunard has the majority of the tale's "inputs," Henry writes. "It takes us about two hours to make a two reel scenario, but we get the idea." Ford says, "If we're all agreed on the story, we make the scenario together; if we disagree, we write a scenario and then we either choose the best one or combine the two versions."

Since Cunard's friendship with Ford came, her film career as an actor, writer, and director did not end. She appeared in Hell's Crater, an elaborate five-reel Western written and directed by W. B. Pearson, and shot on location in Death Valley National Park. Hell's Crater was first published in trade journals in early 1918. In 18 episodes of Elmo Lincoln, she appeared in a serial format, "supporting" Elmo Lincoln in 18 episodes of Elmo the Mighty. During 1920 to 1921, she had the opportunity to work with Marion H. Kohn Productions of San Francisco to once more use the full range of her talents in a series of two-reel Westerns. She wrote, produced, directed, and co-starred in The Man Hater (1920) and A Daughter of The Law (1921); directed and starred in Gasoline Buckaroo (1920) and A Daughter of The Law (1921); and co-wrote, produced, directed, and co-starred Cole Hebert in Her Western Adventure (1921). She appeared in The Last Man on Earth and The Elk's Tooth in 1924 and was relegated to secondary characters for the remainder of the decade.

Cunard's appearances grew as she progressed into minor or uncredited bit parts. She appeared in RKO, Republic, and in handfuls of her old "home studio" Universal's productions in the 1940s. The 1942 serial Gang Busters was one of her more prominent appearances in her final appearances in that period. She appears in one of the serial's 13 episodes as a landlady, but Universal was not concerned enough to include her name in a third-tier bold credit on the serial's theater posters. In the role of a woman with a baby in 1946's Magnificent Doll, she appears in her last film appearance, one uncredited. Universal underwent a change in leadership and administrative reorganization shortly after the film's debut, resulting in the studio's discontinuing its serials and low-budget features. Cunard had been 53 years old by this time, so she decided to retire from the field completely after nearly four decades of motion pictures.

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