Flora Le Breton

Flora Le Breton (1899 – 11 July 1951) was an English actress and silent film performer born in Croydon, Surrey, who built a career spanning British stage and film, Hollywood cinema, and Broadway. The youngest child of Bertram Le Breton, a gentleman of private means, and Florence Evelyn Le Breton, she grew up in a family of English, French, Scottish, and Irish ancestry. Her Scottish lineage included a connection to Archibald Campbell, 2nd Earl of Argyll, and her ancestral home, Ware Park, dated to the fifteenth century. She had an older sister, Violet, born in 1897, and a brother, Vivian Bertram Le Breton, born in 1898, who held the rank of Lieutenant and was killed in action in France in August 1918, having married Miss Theodora Fairbrother only weeks before his death. Her sister Violet later married Major Cecil Haigh and settled in Hong Kong.

Le Breton received her theatrical training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, having earned a scholarship there at the age of fifteen. The academy grant, from an institution founded by Sir Herbert Tree, was presented to her by Sir Squire Bancroft and Sir John Hare. Early in her stage career she played a London flower girl opposite Sir Gerald du Maurier for a full year. The producer André Charlot subsequently cast her in several revues, where she sang and performed a stiff-legged doll dance that became a signature highlight of those productions. In Britain she was referred to both as "the British Mary Pickford" and "the English Mary Pickford."

Her film career began in 1920 with the role of Alesia in La Poupee. In 1922 she co-starred with George K. Arthur and Simeon Stuart in Love's Influence, a British silent film that also featured a cameo by French heavyweight boxer Georges Carpentier. That same year she appeared in The Glorious Adventure, the first colour film produced in Great Britain, shot in Prizma colour, starring Lady Diana Cooper and Victor McLaglen, and produced by J. Stuart Blackton, founder of Vitagraph Studios. Le Breton also won multiple London film favourite contests alongside actress Betty Balfour. In February 1923, she and her partner Cecil Rubens won the world's amateur dancing championship.

Le Breton arrived in the United States in January 1924. Among her early American films was Another Scandal (1924), a production of the Tilford Cinema Corporation shot in Florida, in which she held the third lead after Lois Wilson and Holmes Herbert. She was considered for the role of Peter Pan in the 1924 film adaptation of James Barrie's novel, and she appeared in the melodrama I Am the Man (1924) alongside Lionel Barrymore. Her final screen credit was the Columbia Pictures comedy Charley's Aunt (1930), in which she played Ela Delahay. After establishing herself as a star in the United States, she arranged for her mother to relocate from Britain and settled her in Beverly Hills, California.

Her American stage work began with the play Lass o' Laughter, in which her role required her to perform a Glaswegian Scottish accent. In November 1925, she appeared in the Henry W. Savage production The Balcony Walker at the Lyric Theatre in Bridgeport, Connecticut. By March 1926 she had set aside her film career to perform in the New York City revue The Optimists. In March 1929, columnist Walter Winchell noted in his "Diary of a New Yorker" that Le Breton had become the headliner at a vaudeville theater.

Le Breton's Broadway career extended from 1925 to 1934 and encompassed both plays and musicals. In 1928 she played Lady Delphine in the musical Present Arms, opposite song and dance man Charles King, at Lew Fields' Mansfield Theatre, where the production ran for 155 performances between April 26 and September 1. The Singing Rabbi followed at the Selwyn Theatre in September 1931, running three performances. Later that same year she joined the cast of the musical The Cat and the Fiddle, which opened at the Globe Theatre on October 15, 1931, subsequently moved to George M. Cohan's Theatre, and accumulated 395 performances through September 24, 1932. In October 1932 she began performing in the Theatre Guild production School for Husbands at the Empire Theatre, a cast that included Osgood Perkins and June Walker, and the show ran 116 performances through January 20, 1934. Her final Broadway credit was The Chinese Nightingale, which played eight performances at the Theatre of Young America in October 1934. Le Breton died on July 11, 1951, in Brooklyn, New York City.