Viola Dana

Born Virginia Flugrath on June 26, 1897, in Brooklyn, New York City, where she was raised, she was the middle sister of three siblings who all became actresses. Her sisters were known as Edna Flugrath and Shirley Mason.[1] Dana appeared 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 Manhattan. Between 1910 and 1912, she made four small appearances in the emergent film industry in New York, using the name Viola Flugrath. A particular favorite of audiences was her performance in Eleanor Gates' Poor Little Rich Girl when she was 16.

She began performing in vaudeville with Dustin Farnum in The Little Rebel and played a bit part in The Model by Augustus Thomas.[1]

Metro Pictures advertisement for the filmmaking team of Viola Dana and John H. Collins (1916)

Robert D. Walker and Dana in still for Aladdin's Other Lamp (1917)

With the stage name of Viola Dana, she entered films in 1910, including A Christmas Carol (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 Manufacturing Company, working at their studio in the Bronx. She fell in love with Edison director John Hancock Collins, 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 films for Rolfe/Metro, notably The Girl Without a Soul and Blue Jeans (both 1917). Rolfe closed his New York-area studio in the face of the 1918 flu pandemic and sent most of his personnel to California. Dana left before Collins, who was finishing work at the studio; however, Collins contracted influenza and died in a New York hotel room on October 23, 1918.

Dana remained in California acting for Metro throughout the 1920s, but her popularity gradually waned. One of her latter 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), in The Show of Shows (1929). By the time she made her final film appearance in 1933, she had appeared in over 100 films. She briefly came out of retirement to appear in her first and only television role in a small part on Lux Video Theatre in 1956.[2]

More than 50 years after her retirement from the screen, Dana appeared in the Kevin Brownlow/David Gill documentary series Hollywood (1980), discussing her career as a silent film star during the 1920s. Footage from the interview was used in the later documentary series Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow (1987) from the same team.[3]

Dana's first husband was Edison director John Collins who died in the influenza pandemic of 1918. In 1920, she began a relationship with Ormer "Lock" Locklear, an aviator, military veteran and budding film star. Locklear died when his aircraft crashed on August 2, 1920, during a nighttime film shoot for The Skywayman. Although married, Locklear had been dating Dana, and on the night before his death, in a premonition, gave her some of his personal effects. Dana witnessed the 1920 crash and did not fly again for 25 years.[4][N 1]

Locklear was reputed to be the prototype for the character of Waldo Pepper played by Robert Redford in The Great Waldo Pepper (1975). Dana was an honored guest at its premiere.[5]

Dana was married to Yale football star and actor Maurice "Lefty" Flynn in June 1925.[6] They divorced in February 1929.[7] Her third and final marriage was to golfer Jimmy Thomson from 1930 to March 1945.[8] In later years, she volunteered at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital, and she moved there permanently in 1979.[9] In 1986, one year before her death, she was the subject of a documentary short by Anthony Slide titled Vi: Portrait of a Silent Star, in which she talks of her life and career.

Dana died on July 3, 1987, at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles at the age of 90.[10] Her urn at Hollywood Forever Cemetery lists her as Viola Dana as well as her birth name Flugrath.

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Viola Dana has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It is located at 6541 Hollywood Boulevard.

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  The Flower of No Man's Land (1916)
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  The Flower of No Man's Land (1916)
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  The Light of Happiness (1916)
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  The Gates of Eden (1916)
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  Threads of Fate (1917)
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  The Mortal Sin (1917)
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  God's Law and Man's (1917)
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  Blue Jeans (1917)
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  A Weaver of Dreams (1918)
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  The Only Road (1918)
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  Riders of the Night (1918)
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  Some Bride (1919)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Viola Dana.

• Viola Dana photo gallery
• Viola Dana at IMDb
• Viola Dana at the Internet Broadway Database
• Viola Dana at Virtual History