Evelyn Brent

Brent was born Mary Elizabeth Riggs, known as Betty, to Eleanor Warner Riggs and Arthur Riggs. Brent claimed to be born in Tampa, Florida, to parents who were teenagers of only 13 and 17 respectively, stating in a 1929 interview that:"Of such a violent young love match did I come into existence. My mother was an Italian... indescribably beautiful, with long straight black hair, a white, haunting face. Eyes that told strange things. I knew they were strange even when I was a child. My father was — just an American."The details of Brent's youth are unclear, as according to some sources her father died when Brent was only four years old, in others when Brent was ten years old, in a racing track accident, and others still it was her mother who died first when she was when she was 10, leaving her father to raise her alone. In any case, it seems that Brent was orphaned at a young age, and lived in New York State as a teenager, when her looks attracted modelling jobs that led to opportunities in the movie business.

Evelyn began her film career working as an extra under her own name at New Jersey film studio Fort Lee Studios, appearing in films such as A Man from Mars, A Gentleman From Mississippi and Maurice Tourneur'sThe Pit (1914) for New Jersey's Éclair studio, before her major debut in the 1915 silent film production of Robert W. Service' poem "The Shooting of Dan McGrew". Brent became a protégé of Olga Petrova who was an influence on Brent's independent-minded attitude and preference for darker vampish movie roles. Brent appeared alongside Petrova in pioneering female filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché's The Heart of a Painted Woman (1915). Brent was first credited under her stage name Evelyn Brent in The Lure of Heart's Desire (1916) for Metro Pictures in the role of Little Snowbird, alongside Edmund Breese. Brent took up with a string of young actresses like herself, living together in furnished rooms around New York which she financed with her salary in studio stock companies. Such romantic friendships were interspersed with dramatic suicide attempts, which became a recurring pattern throughout her life. Around this time Brent's roles as a pretty young ingenue in films such as 1916's The Spell of the Yukon and Playing With Fire were promoted in the press, where it was reported that if the US joined WWI she would "don male attire and enlist as a soldier":"What the United States really will need will be people who know how to shoot. And I know how to shoot. I am young. I am strong. Therefore, why should I not be able to fight as well as a man?"After World War I, she traveled to Europe and settled briefly in London, England. She had a role in The Ruined Lady, alongside co-stars C. Aubrey Smith and Nigel Bruce, credited as Evelyn Brent. Brent remained in England for four-five years, performing on stage and in films, then she moved to Hollywood in 1922 in the same year of her first marriage, to Bernhard Powell Fineman, who would become go on to become head of FBO (Film Booking Office) Pictures in 1924, and later an assistant to Paramount's head of production. 1923 saw Brent's career receive a major boost when she was chosen as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. signed her as his leading lady for a film that was abandoned and his next films, The Thief of Bagdad and The Black Pirate, were unsuitable for her. When the press attempted to create a scandal that Fairbanks was cheating on his wife Mary Pickford with her, Brent left his company to join Associated Authors. After a year-long contract that resulted mostly in minor westerns and melodramas, Evelyn signed with Film Booking Office (FBO), which immediately launched her as the "Queen of the Underworld" with a series of crook dramas including Silk Stocking Sal (directed by the master of macabre, Tod Browning), Midnight Molly, Alias Mary Flynn, Smooth as Satin, Lady Robinhood, and Queen o'Diamonds. The minor stardom that Evelyn received from these popular films brought her to the attention of Paramount Pictures, which signed her to a long-term contract. Around this time she was quoted in the Los Angeles Times in relation to her preference for playing in thrillers: “These drawing-room pictures in which you have to play the part of an animated clothes-horse give me a pain. They give you no chance whatever to develop individuality or character.” Paramount launched her tenure at the company with the lead in the popular shopgirl comedy Love 'Em and Leave 'Em, where her screen impact overshadowed by the appearance of Louise Brooks as Brent's younger sister. Josef Von Sternberg, an acquaintance from her time in British films and a fan of her FBO series of crook pictures, cast her as Feathers (over the objections of Paramount executives, who preferred Estelle Taylor for the role) in the gangster epic Underworld (1927) which became her real break in Hollywood. Brent appeared in Von Sternberg's The Last Command (1928), an epic drama starring Emil Jannings and William Powell. Von Sternberg worked with her for the third and last time in The Drag Net (1928), which reunited her with her Underworld co-star George Bancroft. In-between and after her series of films with Von Sternberg, Paramount cast Brent in a string of pictures that sustained her popularity, including a sequel to 1926's hit Beau Geste called Beau Sabreur, the melodrama His Tiger Wife, and her last silent film The Mating Call for director James Cruze. Brent was cast as the female lead in Paramount's first all-talking picture Interference. She was loaned to Universal Pictures for the musical-drama Broadway, which ran for two years. Her Paramount contract had about a year left to run, and she appeared in Paramount on Parade. Brent played major roles in several features, most notably The Silver Horde. By the early part of the 1930s, she was working in secondary roles in a variety of films as well as touring with vaudeville shows. In 1936, she played William Boyd's love interest/femme fatale in Hopalong Cassidy Returns. However, by 1941, she was no longer in demand by major studios, and she found work at smaller, low-budget studios. Evelyn Brent photographed attractively with leading men who were at advanced ages and later stages in their careers: Jack Holt in the Columbia serial Holt of the Secret Service, Neil Hamilton in PRC's production Dangerous Lady, and Lee Tracy in the same studio's The Payoff. In the early 1940s, she worked in action features for Paramount, produced by Pine-Thomas Productions. VDirector William Beaudine cast her in many productions, including Emergency Landing (1941), Bowery Champs (1944), The Golden Eye (1948), and Again Pioneers (1950). After performing in more than 120 films, she retired from acting in 1950 and worked for a number of years as an actor's agent. She returned to acting in television's Wagon Train 1960 S3 E14 "The Lita Foladaire Story". Brent played the housekeeper Mrs. Simmons, and her appearance had changed radically.

Evelyn Brent was married three times: to movie executive Bernard P. Fineman, to producer Harry D. Edwards, and to the vaudeville actor Harry Fox. Fox and she were married until he died in 1959. Brent was bisexual and also lived with romantic female partners throughout her life, including Hollywood gossip columnist and writer of scandalous potboilers Dorothy Ducas Herzog. Brent died of a heart attack in 1975 at age 79 in her Los Angeles home. She is interred in the San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, California.