Dorothy Davenport

Fannie Dorothy Davenport was born on March 13, 1895, in Boston, Massachusetts, into a family with deep roots in American performance. Her father, Harry Davenport, was a Broadway star and comedian, and her mother, Alice Davenport, was a film actress with at least 140 screen appearances to her credit. Her grandparents, Edward Loomis Davenport and Fanny Vining Davenport, were celebrated 19th-century character actors, and her aunt, Fanny Davenport, was regarded as one of the foremost stage actresses of her era. Davenport received her schooling in Brooklyn and Roanoke, Virginia, and made her first professional appearance in a stock company at the age of six. By age fourteen she was working in burlesque, and after approximately a year and a half in vaudeville she relocated from Boston to Southern California at age sixteen to pursue a film career.

She joined the Nestor Film Company, which was later acquired by Universal Pictures, and her first known screen appearance was a supporting role in Life Cycle. A skilled horsewoman, she performed many of her own stunts during this period. It was at Nestor that she worked alongside actor and director Wallace Reid, and the two married in October 1913. The couple departed Universal for other projects but returned in 1916. On June 18, 1917, Davenport gave birth to their son, Wallace Reid Jr., in Los Angeles, a development that led her to step back from performing to focus on motherhood. In 1920, she and Reid adopted a daughter, Betty Anna Reid, born in 1919.

Before her career shifted decisively toward film production, Davenport appeared on Broadway in 1915 in the musical Stop! Look! Listen!, a credit that reflected both her family's stage heritage and her own range as a performer.

While Reid was filming The Valley of the Giants on location in California in 1919, he was injured in a train wreck, and studio doctors administered large doses of morphine to manage his pain. The treatment produced an addiction that steadily worsened his health over the following years, and Reid died in January 1923 at the age of 31. Drawing directly on her own experience, Davenport co-produced Human Wreckage with Thomas Ince, casting James Kirkwood Sr., Bessie Love, and Lucille Ricksen in a film that addressed the dangers of narcotics addiction. Developed with assistance from the Los Angeles Anti-Narcotics League and marketed as a moral crusade, the film billed Davenport as "Mrs. Wallace Reid." She took it on a roadshow engagement with personal appearances.

Davenport continued in the social-conscience vein with Broken Laws in 1924, again billed as "Mrs. Wallace Reid," a film centered on the theme of excessive maternal indulgence. The following year she produced The Red Kimono, based on a real prostitution case from New Orleans in 1917. Because Davenport used the actual name of the woman portrayed by actress Priscilla Bonner, the subject of the story sued and won a landmark privacy case. Both Human Wreckage and The Red Kimono were banned in the United Kingdom by the British Board of Film Censors in 1926.

After her production company dissolved in the late 1920s, Davenport continued working in film in a range of capacities. In 1929 she directed Linda, a film about a woman who sacrifices her own happiness to meet the expectations of men and society. She directed her last film in 1934, a year in which she also worked on Road to Ruin and The Woman Condemned. Her later credits included co-authorship of the screenplay for Footsteps in the Fog in 1955 and service as dialogue supervisor on The First Traveling Saleslady in 1956, the latter starring Ginger Rogers.

In the final years of her life, Davenport possessed a print of her late husband's 1921 feature Forever, which she donated to an organization planning a film museum. When those plans collapsed, the print was lost. Dorothy Davenport died on October 12, 1977, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, at the age of 82. She is interred alongside her husband at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.