Lillian Rich, the English silent screen siren, arrived in New York at the tender age of 19, courtesy of her Canadian husband Lionel Edward Nicholson, a well-to-do middle-class fighter pilot who had met her while on active duty with the Royal Naval Air Service during World War I.
Prior to entering films, Lillian had briefly made a name for herself in musical comedy on the stage, and it was her husband's stake of $1000 that enabled her to launch her Hollywood career.
In 1919, Lillian started out on the screen playing sultry leads in westerns opposite stalwart sagebrush heroes like Jack Hoxie and Harry Carey, and by the end of 1922, she had already amassed 19 feature film credits on her resume.
Following a divorce from her husband, Lillian took a year's sabbatical from the screen before resuming her career with renewed vigor in 1924. The next year, she was cast by the ever-extravagant Cecil B. DeMille in her defining role as an aristocratic social-climbing, impecunious vamp in Paramount's The Golden Bed (1925).
Attired in silks and bedecked with diamond bracelets, Lillian added to the general opulence (and excess) of the proceedings, and she then gave what is considered her other notable performance, opposite H.B. Warner in the western railroad drama Whispering Smith (1926).
There was also a minor Christie comedy, Seven Days (1925),a crime thriller with Boris Karloff, and a host of low-budget B-pictures for independent producers and Poverty Row outfits like Chesterfield and Tiffany.
Between 1928 and 1930, Lillian attempted a comeback in sound pictures, filming in England at Beaconsfield and at Nettlefold Studios (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey),but these low-budget "quota quickies" were made for the mass market and did nothing to reboot her career.
Back in the States, Lillian found herself relegated to the bottom of the bill in "Our Gang" shorts and saw out the rest of the 1930's in uncredited, no-name bits as "nurse", "nun", "telephone operator", and so on, before fading into relative obscurity.
