Dorothy Phillips

Dorothy Phillips, born Dorothy Gwendolyn Strible on October 30, 1889, in Baltimore, was an American stage and film actress whose career spanned more than three decades. She died on March 1, 1980, at the age of 90, from pneumonia, and is buried alongside her husband at the Secret Garden section of Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Phillips received her education at the College of Expression of Maryland, after which she began her stage career with the George Fawcett Stock Co. She subsequently worked with Colonel Savage Productions, performing in both New York and Chicago. It was during a Chicago production of Every Woman, in which she played the character Modesty, that she met actor-director Allen Holubar, whom she later married. Their marriage lasted eleven years until Holubar's death from pneumonia in 1923, following surgery, at the age of 33. Phillips did not return to acting until mid-1925 following his death.

Her film career began in 1911 with a two-reeler called The Rosary, and she went on to appear in more than 150 films. She became associated with Universal Pictures, where she frequently starred alongside Lon Chaney, and occasionally supplemented her Universal work with short films made at Fox Studios. Her facility for imitating Russian Hollywood actress Alla Nazimova earned her the nickname Kid Nazimova. By 1917, having appeared in 22 films over two years, Phillips suffered a breakdown from exhaustion, which also disrupted her professional relationship with director Joseph De Grasse and his wife, screenwriter and director Ida May Park. After recovering, she returned in 1918 to a productive stretch of work, including A Soul for Sale, the first film she made under her husband's direction. The couple's collaboration proved commercially successful, and in 1920 they established Allen Holubar Productions, with their films distributed through First National Pictures to continued acclaim.

Her Broadway career ran from 1926 to 1933 and included four productions: the musical Lucky, the musical Three Cheers, the revue The Great Temptations, and the revue George White's Music Hall Varieties in 1932. Following 1927, her screen work diminished considerably, and she appeared primarily in uncredited supporting roles. Her final film appearance came in the 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

For her contributions to the motion picture industry, Phillips received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6358 Hollywood Boulevard. The 1918 film The Heart of Humanity, which she made with Holubar, was screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of a 2014 exhibition.