Fanny Midgley

Fanny Midgley, born Fanny B. Tilton on November 26, around 1865, in Cincinnati, Ohio, was an American stage and film actress whose career spanned vaudeville, Broadway, and Hollywood's silent and early sound eras. She was the daughter of Joseph Tilton and Henrietta Garrison. Although her death certificate records her birth year as 1879, census records from 1870 and 1880 list her alongside her parents at ages 5 and 14, respectively, making the earlier birth year considerably more probable. Midgley died on January 4, 1932, in Hollywood.

In 1885, Midgley married fellow actor Sager Midgley, Jr. (1862–1929) in Cincinnati, and the two built a vaudeville act together, reaching New York stages by 1890. The couple had four known children, at least two of whom died in infancy. A surviving son, Miles Raymond Midgley (1899–1945), also pursued a career in show business. On Broadway, Midgley appeared in the 1906 production of The Free Lance, in which she portrayed the character Mopsa.

Following her stage work, Midgley relocated to Hollywood, where she married Cecil S. Frier on August 14, 1914. That same year she made her feature film debut in Shorty Escapes Marriage and accumulated 27 film appearances in total, among them The Sheriff of Bisbee, in which she appeared alongside Mildred Harris. Between 1915 and 1919, she added another 32 films to her credits, largely in supporting roles, closing out the decade with The Lottery Man (1919), which starred Wanda Hawley and Wallace Reid.

Through the 1920s, Midgley's output gradually declined, with 22 film appearances between 1920 and 1926. The most prominent of these was the 1922 production The Young Rajah, in which she appeared alongside Rudolph Valentino. From 1927 to 1929, her screen appearances slowed further to five, including The Cowboy Cavalier (1928) with Buddy Roosevelt. She nonetheless made a partial transition into sound films, appearing in The Poor Millionaire (1930), starring Richard Talmadge and Constance Howard, and in An American Tragedy (1931), which featured Sylvia Sidney and Phillips Holmes.