In honor of Valentine’s Day it’s time to celebrate a female screenwriter who managed to take bubble-gum parts for actresses and give them more gumption, gravitas, and giggles inside the light musical genre films she was assigned.
Born in New York City in 1909, Dorothy Kingsley could be called a nepo-baby as her mother Alma Hanlon became a silent film star a few years later. Hanlon acted for 4 years from 19150-1919. By then she had left her husband Walter J. Kingsley (press agent to Florenz Ziegfeld), married again and moved young Dorothy to Michigan.
Eventually, Kingsley found her way back into the industry but this time by moving herself and her 3 children to Los Angeles where radio was king. There she met Constance Bennett who like her mother had been a big silent film star in the 1920s but now hosted a radio show. Bennett began buying Kingsley’s jokes for her monologues which lead to a place on the writing staff of the The Edgar Bergen Show.
Read A Master of Musical Romances: The Screenwriting Career of Dorothy Kingsley
Read about more women from early Hollywood
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