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 (29
November 1901, Cheyenne, Wyoming - 20 July 1944, Hollywood,
California)
Born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Mildred Harris made her first screen
appearances at the age of eleven in the Francis Ford and Thomas H.
Ince directed 1912 Western film short The Post Telegrapher then went
on to play a variety of juvenile roles, including turns in the Oz
film series produced by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz author L. Frank
Baum. She was a prominent child actor throughout the 1910s. She
eventually graduated to leading lady assignments, working under the
direction of such prominent filmmakers as Cecil B. DeMille and D.W.
Griffith throughout the 1910s. In 1914, she was hired by The Oz Film
Manufacturing Company to portray Fluff in The Magic Cloak of Oz and
Button-Bright in His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz. Her contract was
not signed until The Patchwork Girl of Oz was already in production
and she did not, in spite of what some sources claim, appear in that
film. In 1916, at the age of 15, Mildred Harris appeared in
Griffith's colossal film epic Intolerance alongside another new
teenaged Griffith protégé, Carol Dempster. The two young starlets
were cast by Griffith as Babylonian harem girls. Griffith would cast
Harris yet again as a harem girl in his 1919 film The Fall of
Babylon.
She appeared in 132 films in her career from 1912 to 1944. |
