Marie Prevost was a Canadian-born film actress. Modern audiences tend to look back upon movie stars of an earlier age as somehow simpler and more innocent, untainted by the temptations and setbacks that visit contemporary celebrities. Anyone who investigates the back pages of an earlier Hollywood is sure to find that this isn’t the case. Take the story of Marie Prevost. Born in Canada, Mary Bickford Dunn moved to L.A. and made her movie debut in 1916. A couple of years later, she was signed on as one of Mack Sennett’s “Bathing Beauties.” No doubt dismayed by the similarity of her given name to one of the biggest stars in Hollywood (Mary Pickford), the comedy of Svengali renamed her Marie Prevost, “The Exotic French Girl.” The rechristened beauty moved on to many starring roles as the ‘20s quintessential brazen and independent female, the flapper. She appeared in a series of romantic comedies made by some of the biggest directors of the time, including Cecil B. DeMille and Ernst Lubitsch, and her career seemed to be on an upward trajectory. Circumstances halted the rising star, however. Her marriage to leading man Kenneth Harlan began to fail, and her mother was killed in a car crash. Prevost began to drink, and her slim flapper body lost its shape. The industry’s transition to sound affected almost every actor who had been a star in the silent era, and Prevost was lumped into this group of former silent stars. Her drinking increased, and by the early 30s, she was lucky to play bit parts. Desperate to recover some of her former glamor, Prevost began to diet dangerously. This, combined with her ongoing alcohol problem, could only lead to disaster. On January 23, 1937, neighbors irritated by the barking of a dog in Prevost’s apartment called the police. What the police found shocked them: the malnutritioned corpse of Marie Prevost, her legs and arms chewed up by her traumatized dog. Years later, pop singer Nick Lowe would somewhat indelicately memorialize this discovery in his song “Marie Provost.” The final indignity for the forgotten Marie, he misspelling of her name in the title. She died January 21, 1937 at the age 38.
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