10 Things You Didn't Know About Hollywood
9. Hollywood's First Star Committed Suicide
In 1910, Hollywood’s most popular actress was “The Biograph Girl”, so named because performers in those days weren’t credited, and this particular starlet was under contract to the Biograph company.
Under her real name, Florence Lawrence, she went to work for Carl Laemmle (who would later run Universal), receiving a higher salary (a then unheard-of $250 a week) and, for the first time, screen credit. Within five years, performers such as Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin were signing for $2000 and $10,000 a week respectively.
Lawrence never enjoyed their level of success, however, and by the late 1920s had been reduced to mostly uncredited bit parts. On the afternoon of 28 December 1938, she was rushed to Beverly Hills Emergency Hospital and pronounced dead by suicide. She had eaten a fatal amount of ant paste.