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Bridgwood, Florence Annie (Solter; Woodring; Bolton), known as Florence Lawrence and “the Biograph Girl,” actor; b. 2 Jan. 1886 in Hamilton, Ont., third child of George Bridgwood and Charlotte Amelia Dunn; m. first 30 Aug. 1908 Henry Lewis Solter (1873–1920) in Elizabeth, N.J.; m. secondly 12 May 1921 Charles Bryan Woodring (1896–1952) in San Francisco; they divorced in February 1931; m. thirdly 27 Nov. 1933 Henry Bolton (dates unknown) in Yuma, Ariz.; they divorced in April 1934; no children were born of any of the marriages; d. 28 Dec. 1938 in West Hollywood (Los Angeles).

Florence Bridgwood’s father, George, was a carriage builder and her mother, Charlotte, an actor, known on the stage as Lotta (Lottie) Lawrence. George’s first wife had died of breast cancer in 1878, leaving him a widower with four adult children, all of whom were older than the woman who became their stepmother in 1880 and did not accept her. Charlotte Dunn was not yet 20 and George was in his fifties. Whether the gap in their ages was responsible for the breakdown of the marriage is unclear. By the time Florence was four her parents were living apart. In 1889 or 1890 Charlotte moved the family to Buffalo, N.Y., where she lived with her widowed mother and where she ran a saloon and boarding house for a time. Accompanied by her daughter and two sons, she had begun touring with her Lawrence Dramatic Company throughout the midwestern and western United States. During the family’s time on the road, Florence, who took her mother’s stage name Lawrence, developed a strong maternal tie that would persist until Charlotte’s death.

At some point Charlotte took her children off the stage to counter their erratic education. Florence would state in her autobiography that she graduated from Public School No.10 in Buffalo, but this information cannot be verified and it is not known if she attended high school; there is no documentary evidence of her presence in the city’s school system. In interviews she would say that she had been a student at Toronto’s Loretto Abbey, which also has no record of her attendance. Whatever the case, she claimed that her education included horseback riding, lessons that would prove an asset in her budding film career. Like her contemporary Mary Pickford [Gladys Louise Smith*], Florence Lawrence found that her training as a child actor – which included learning roles quickly and coping with new situations on the fly – was useful during her early years in silent movies.

Lawrence and her mother moved in 1906 to New York City. In 1910 Lawrence told a reporter that she had found resuming a career in theatre as an adult difficult: her auditions and approaches to theatre managers on Broadway met with no success. She may have been at a disadvantage because the hiatus in her performing career left her with no recent experience; changes in American theatre perhaps also made finding work problematic, touring having become more expensive and the number of productions having declined. Lawrence and Charlotte applied for roles in the Edison Manufacturing Company’s film Daniel Boone; or, Pioneer days in America (1907); Charlotte was cast as Mrs Boone and Lawrence as one of Boone’s daughters, a role that allowed her to draw upon her equestrian experience. Unlike earlier 19th-century melodramas that featured young women as victims of class- and gender-based oppression, Daniel Boone and other silent films starring Lawrence depicted her characters as healthy and adventurous young women. The pluck and physical skills she demonstrated in these roles allowed the figures she portrayed to overcome the dangerous situations in which they were placed, such as being kidnapped by Native Americans. Charlotte preferred that her daughter stay on the stage, however, and the two next appeared in Melville B. Raymond’s production of The seminary girl: a farce with music, touring the midwest in 1907 and early 1908. But Lawrence had become fascinated with film. She went back to New York and began working for the Vitagraph Company of America, one of the major silent-movie companies in the city. She featured in The boy, the bust and the bath, which started to be shown in August 1907, and would go on to play in Vitagraph’s adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s The shaughraun while waiting for The seminary girl to start rehearsals.

Although Lawrence would return briefly to the stage in mid-1920s vaudeville, from 1908 on her career was primarily devoted to film. Between the summer of 1907 and the end of 1908, she made 13 pictures for Vitagraph. While there she met her first husband, actor Harry Solter. He persuaded her to follow him to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, where he had begun work as an assistant director to David Lewelyn Wark (D. W.) Griffith and had been asked to scout Vitagraph for a female actor who could appear in Griffith’s westerns. Here again Lawrence’s athleticism on horseback proved useful. She began with The girl and the outlaw and would make just under 100 films for Biograph, as the company was usually called, becoming such a popular figure that she was known as the Biograph Girl (at this time actors received no on-screen credits). By the fall of 1909, however, dissatisfied with the ever-quickening pace of film-making under Griffith, Lawrence and Solter approached the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company in Chicago for work; the latter reported their overtures to Biograph and both were swiftly fired. (A number of film companies, including Biograph, Essanay, Vitagraph, Edison, and the Pathé Company, had formed the Motion Picture Patents Company, which frowned on employees attempting to move between organizations.) The couple joined Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture Company of America, and they made about 50 films for Laemmle between November 1909 and September 1910; they then worked for Siegmund Lubin in Philadelphia until January 1912. Some months later Lawrence and Solter formed their own organization in New York, the Victor Film Company, which became associated with, and was eventually absorbed by, Laemmle’s new Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Lawrence acted in some 45 films with Victor, animating plots that featured romantic intrigues, mysteries, and social concerns (such as interfaith marriage, adoption, and mental illness), including one that concerned illicit arms trading in Central America.

Lawrence’s work between 1908 and 1914 was the highlight of her career. She was injured in an accident on the set of The pawns of destiny in March 1914, and although she carried on for a time, her last film that year was released in November, and she did not appear on screen again until 1916. She recuperated at her recently acquired home in Westwood, N.J., where she indulged her passion for growing roses. Her return to the movies – in her first full-length feature (Elusive Isabel) – was not a success and film roles subsequently dried up. “It is pretty hard,” she would later comment, “at the age of thirty-one, to be left, forgotten by an industry you helped so hard to develop.”

In 1916 Lawrence and Solter, whose marriage had been rocky, separated for a final time and filed for divorce. The proceedings were not pursued, however, and their union would end only with his death from a stroke on 2 March 1920. Lawrence went to California later that year, apparently to head a school of dramatic expression in San Francisco, and she unsuccessfully attempted a cinematic comeback in Los Angeles in 1921. Though she continued to make movies there, she never regained her status as a leading actor. Plagued by poor health over the years and spurned by her industry, she turned to other activities: volunteering for the American National Red Cross during the First World War; designing mechanical turn and stop signals for automobiles, inventions that reflected her love of cars; and opening a cosmetics company with her second husband in the 1920s. Her life took a sombre turn with her mother’s death on 20 Aug. 1929 and her separation from Charles Woodring that December. During the divorce proceedings in February she said, rather poignantly, “He told me that he was tired of me – that I did not keep myself as pretty as I used to. He said he loved another.” Her last marriage, to Harry Bolton, was short-lived. An alcoholic with a vicious temper, Bolton was physically abusive, and Lawrence divorced him after he inflicted a beating that left her with facial cuts and serious bruises.

Lawrence appeared in small parts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1936 until just before her death, but this work was seen by her (and by the studio) as an act of charity towards older actors. During this period she developed a painful and debilitating bone disease. She became increasingly depressed, and on 28 Dec. 1938 she was taken to the Beverly Hills Emergency Hospital after consuming a mixture of cough syrup and ant paste – and leaving a note that said, “I am tired. Hope this works.” She died a short time later and was buried on the 30th in the Hollywood Memorial (Hollywood Forever) Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Lawrence’s sad ending risks overshadowing important aspects of her life. For one, she represents a number of young Canadian-born or Canadian-raised women who, during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, forged careers as actors in either theatre or film, becoming part of a network of transnational performance circuits. (Like many of these contemporaries, including fellow Hamiltonian Julia Arthur, Lawrence was claimed at times as a Canadian, although she spent her life almost entirely in the United States.) No doubt her beauty played a part in her celebrity but so too did her acting ability. As a number of film historians have argued, she had a knack for making her characters appealing. She and Solter also had a keen appreciation of early-20th-century celebrity culture. In 1910 they participated in what some film historians have described as the first movie publicity stunt. Staged by Laemmle, it involved spreading rumours of her death in a traffic accident, countering them with contradictions, and then building on the suspense to ensure large crowds when she eventually made an appearance in St Louis, Mo. Her career was also distinguished by the subject matter of many of her films which, coupled with her energy and athleticism, makes her an important representative of modern, youthful North American womanhood. Lawrence was occasionally compared to Pickford. Had she possessed Pickford’s ambition and business acumen, she might well have enjoyed a longer and more lucrative career. As it is, her life exemplifies the precariousness, as well as the excitement and glamour, of the silent-screen era. After her death Lawrence was forgotten, but in the late 20th century, scholarly and popular interest in early women film-makers resulted in a revival of her memory and a re-evaluation of her legacy.

Cecilia Morgan