Early Life and Career
She was born Daisy Juliette Baker in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of William Baker and Harriet Anna Harong. As a child, Daisy Baker lived in the southern states, where she was mainly raised by her godfather, the writer Joel Chandler Harris.
Dumont trained as an operatic singer and actress in her teens, and began performing on stage in both America and Europe, at first under the name Daisy Dumont and later as Margaret (or Marguerite) Dumont. Her theatrical debut was in Beauty and the Beast at the Chestnut Theater in Philadelphia, and in August 1902, two months before her 20th birthday, she appeared as a singer/comedienne in a vaudeville act in Atlantic City. The dark-haired soubrette, described by a theater reviewer as a "statuesque beauty", attracted notice later that decade for her vocal and comedic talents in The Girl Behind the Counter (1908), The Belle of Brittany (1909), and The Summer Widower (1910).
In 1910, she married millionaire sugar heir and industrialist John Moller Jr. and retired from stage work, although she had a small uncredited role as an aristocrat in a 1917 film adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities. After her husband's sudden death in 1918, she returned reluctantly to the Broadway stage, and soon gained a strong reputation in musical comedy productions. Her Broadway career included roles in the musical comedies and plays The Fan (1921), Go Easy, Mabel (1922), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923/24), and The Fourflusher (1925), and she had an uncredited role in the 1923 film Enemies of Women.
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