Juanita Hansen - Personal Problems

Personal Problems

When she returned to work, behavioral problems caused by her drug addiction disrupted filming and ended her relationship with Pathé. She appeared in secondary roles in two more films, but by 1923 her film career was over at the age of twenty-eight. Her life became a series of constant ups and downs fighting her addictions. Hansen was named as one of two co-respondents in a divorce suit brought by Evelyn Nesbit against Jack Clifford. Clifford left Nesbit in 1918 and she divorced him in 1933.

She began working in live theatre, appearing in 1928 in the short-lived Broadway production, The High Hatters. Ten years after her last film in 1933, she was given a secondary but important role in a Monogram Pictures B-movie, Sensation Hunters (1933). This, her first talkie, would be her last film and the ensuing years were marked by a continual struggle with her drug addiction. In 1934 Juanita tried a comeback in movies but it was unsuccessful.

At one point, she attempted suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. She survived and the experience helped turn her around. Although her acting career was long over, and her drug habit had left her penniless, she took a job as a clerk for a railroad company. She also worked in the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression.