Florence Lawrence - Injury, Crash of '29, and Suicide

Injury, Crash of '29, and Suicide

Despite her mooted retirement, Lawrence was induced to return to work in 1914 for her company (Victor Film Company), which was later acquired by Universal Studios. During the filming of Pawns of Destiny, a staged fire got out of control. Lawrence was burned, her hair singed, and she suffered a serious fall. She went into shock for months. She returned to work, but collapsed after the film's completion. Blaming Solter for making her do the stunt in which she was injured, the two were divorced. To add to her problems, Universal refused to pay her medical expenses, leaving Lawrence to feel betrayed.

In the spring of 1916, she returned to work for Universal and completed another feature film, Elusive Isabel. However, the strain of working took its toll on her and she suffered a serious relapse. She was completely paralyzed for four months. By the time she returned to the screen in 1921, few people remembered her. In 1921 she traveled to Hollywood to attempt a comeback. However, she had little success, and received a leading role in a minor melodrama (The Unfoldment), and then two supporting roles. All of her screen work after 1924 would be in uncredited bit parts. During the 1920s she and her husband Charles began to manufacture a line of cosmetics, which they continued in partnership after their divorce.

Although only 29 years old, she never regained her stature as a leading film star after taking time off to recover from her injuries. The following year she married automobile salesman Charles Byrne Woodring, but they were divorced in 1931. In 1933 she got married for the third time to Henry Bolton, who turned out to be abusive and beat Lawrence severely. The union lasted only five months.

When Lawrence's mother died in 1929, she had an expensive bust sculpted for her mother's tomb. By then, in her mid-forties, demand for her in films had long since disappeared and the stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression saw Lawrence's fortune decline.

Lawrence returned to the screen in 1936, when MGM began giving small parts to old stars for seventy-five dollars a week.

Alone, discouraged, and suffering with chronic pain from myelofibrosis, a rare bone marrow disease, she was found unconscious in bed in her West Hollywood apartment on 27 December 1938 after she had ingested ant paste. She was rushed to a hospital but died a few hours later.

Just nine years after she had paid for an expensive memorial for her mother, Lawrence was interred in an unmarked grave not far from her mother in the Hollywood Cemetery, which is now Hollywood Forever Cemetery, in Hollywood, California.

She remained forgotten until 1991, when actor Roddy McDowall, serving on the National Film Preservation Board, paid for a memorial marker that reads: "The Biograph Girl/The First Movie Star."

In William J. Mann's novel The Biograph Girl (2000), Mann asks the question, "What if Florence Lawrence didn't die in 1938 from eating ant poison, but is 106 and living in a nursing home in Buffalo, New York?" The novel faithfully covers Lawrence's life up to 1938 and takes it beyond, after her "supposed" suicide.

A biography by Kelly R. Brown, Florence Lawrence, the Biograph Girl: America's First Movie Star, was published in 1999.