2013 Essays

Dorothy Davenport Reid

Anderson, Mark Lynn

When she moved to Southern California as an actress with the Nestor Film Company in late 1911, Dorothy Davenport became one of the first members of the early film colony soon to be known as Hollywood. One early biography appearing in Moving Picture Stories reported that the actress had remained with the eastern branch of that company until late 1912 (31). However, a photograph in the Los Angeles Public Library shows the personnel of the Nestor Company in Pasadena, California, on December 23, 1911, with Dorothy Davenport a prominent member of the stock company. While at Nestor, which soon became a unit of Universal Pictures, she met actor Wallace Reid, whom she married in October of 1913. Both were popular players at Universal during the mid-teens, but Reid’s career accelerated after 1915 when he signed a long-term contract with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company and starred in a number of Cecil B. DeMille films, the year before the company merger that produced Famous-Players Lasky. Davenport Reid performed screen work less and less after giving birth to a son in 1917, though she was often featured in fan magazine stories about the Reids’ domestic life, like the 1921 Photoplay article “Where Bill Lives!”