2013 Essays

Marion Fairfax

Slater, Tom

Between 1904 and 1915, Marion Fairfax wrote several successful Broadway plays before turning to screenwriting. Over the next eleven years, she achieved even greater success in her new field. In 1921, she formed her own production company that produced The Lying Truth (1922), which Fairfax wrote and directed. The most enduring film with which she was associated was The Lost World (1925), a science fiction picture about an isolated land of dinosaurs that featured tremendous special effects. A handwritten note attached to a First National Pictures legal department memo dated December 6, 1923, states: “Fairfax is always a winner—Don’t ever let her get away. Tom [unidentified] knows she is both restless and damn independent.” Three years later, however, Fairfax received her final credit for The Blonde Saint (1926) and then disappeared from filmmaking. She was married to actor Tully Marshall, who died in 1943, for forty-three years.