Viola Dana - Career

Career

Born Virginia Flugrath, Dana was a child star, appearing on the stage at the age of three. She read Shakespeare and particularly identified with the teenage Juliet. She enjoyed a long run at the Hudson Theater in New York City. A particular favorite of audiences was her performance in David Belasco's Poor Little Rich Girl, when she was 16. She went into vaudeville with Dustin Farnum in The Little Rebel and played a bit part in The Model by Augustus Thomas.

Dana entered films in 1910. Her first motion picture was made at a former Manhattan (New York) riding academy on West 61st Street. The stalls had been transformed to dressing rooms. Dana became a star with the Edison Company, working at their studio in the Bronx. She fell in love with Edison director John Hancock Collins (1889–1918) and they married in 1915. Dana's success in Collins's Edison features such as Children of Eve (1915) and The Cossack Whip (1916) encouraged producer B. A. Rolfe to offer the couple lucrative contracts with his company, Rolfe Photoplays, which released through Metro Pictures Corporation. Dana and Collins accepted Rolfe's offer in 1916 and made several important films for Rolfe/Metro, notably The Girl Without a Soul and Blue Jeans (both 1917). Rolfe closed his New York-area studio down in the face of the 1918 influenza epidemic and sent most of his personnel to California. Dana left before Collins, who was finishing work at the studio; however, Collins contracted influenza which rapidly turned into pneumonia and died in a New York hotel room on October 23, 1918.

Dana remained in California acting for Metro. In 1920, she became engaged to Ormer Locklear, a daring aviator and military veteran. Locklear died when his plane crashed on August 2, 1920 during a nighttime film shoot for a serial, The Skywayman, for Fox Studios. Locklear was the prototype for the Robert Redford movie, The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), and Dana was an honored guest at its premiere. Dana witnessed the 1920 crash. She would not fly again for 25 years.

Dana continued to act throughout the 1920s, but her popularity gradually waned. One of her last important roles was in Frank Capra's first film for Columbia Pictures, That Certain Thing (1928). She retired from the screen in 1929. Her final screen credits are roles in Two Sisters (1929), One Splendid Hour (1929), and with her sister Leonie Flugrath, better known as Shirley Mason (years earlier she had appeared with her older sister, Edna Flugrath, in the 1923 film The Social Code), The Show of Shows (1929). By the time she made her final film appearance, she had appeared in over 100 films. More than 50 years after her retirement from the screen, she appeared in the documentary Hollywood (1980), discussing her career as a silent film star during the 1920s. Footage from the interview sessions was used in the 1987 documentary Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow.