Lois Weber
Lois Weber ( born June 13, 1881 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, † November 13, 1939 in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California ) was an American film director.
Life
Lois Weber came from good middle-class home. She played the piano, but ran away from home to begin vocal studies in New York City. To get to know the situation of poor people, she worked in the slums of New York and Pittsburgh as a missionary. She preached on the streets and sang religious songs. 1905, they came as an actress for the film, where she met her future husband Phillips Smalley. In 1906 she got married. From 1911 they began to produce as a director and screenwriter movies with her husband. In 1914 with the film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, the first feature film in movie history, in which a woman was directing. Her films were characterized by social issues that were told controversial and yet had success at the box office. In 1916 she moved from the Gaumont Film Company to Universal Studios and Universal's highest paid director was. In this period was the later famous John Ford one of her assistants. In 1917 she founded her own film production company: the Lois Weber Productions. Their most successful film of this period was The Blot ( 1921) with Claire Windsor and Louis Calhern in the lead roles.
In the 1920s, however, her career then got a kink. First, she divorced her alcoholic husband, and suffered a nervous breakdown. Her films also had not the success that they had in the years at Universal in the 1920s. In 1926 she married a second time. This marriage was divorced in 1935. Lois Weber turned in 1927 her last silent film. In 1934, she attempted a comeback with the sound film White Heat, which, however, was a failure. She then worked as a script doctor for Universal and died penniless in 1939 at the age of 58 years.