Petite, sultry leading lady of the 1920s and '30s, born and schooled in Tampa, Florida, until the age of ten when she lost her mother. She moved to New York with her dad and started modeling while still in her teens.
Her original intention was to go into the teaching profession. Instead, Evelyn became enamored with acting during a school visit to the Popular Plays and Players Studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, a production cooperative for distributors World Film, Pathe and Metro.
Before long, she obtained a job as an extra for $3 a week using her birth name Betty Riggs. Between 1914 and 1920, she appeared in featured film roles with stars like Olga Petrova and John Barrymore, who hand-picked her as his leading lady for Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1917).
Then, she took a sabbatical for health reasons and went to England. By making the acquaintance of American playwright Oliver Cromwell, she was able to land a good role in the George Bernard Shaw comedy 'The Ruined Lady' on the London stage.
This, in turn, led to her being cast as leading lady in several British films. In 1922, she even went to Spain as star of The Spanish Jade (1922),distributed in America by Paramount. Upon her return to the United States in 1924, she was briefly under contract to Fox, then joined Associated Authors, and, finally, Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky (1926-30).
At the height of her career in silent films, the dark-haired, aquiline Evelyn became a matinee idol with performances as exotic temptresses and vamps, particularly in films by Austrian director Josef von Sternberg. She was notable as the gangster's moll 'Feathers' in Underworld (1927),the proverbial tough broad with the heart of gold, and as a self-sacrificing Russian girl in love with an exiled Czarist general (Emil Jannings) in The Last Command (1928).
She gave another interesting performance as a blackmailer in Paramount's first all-talking picture Interference (1928). While Evelyn's voice proved no detriment to her success in talking pictures, the declining quality of her films certainly did.
