Jacqueline Logan

Jacqueline Medura Logan was an American actress and silent film star born on November 30, 1902, in Corsicana, Texas. The only child of Charles A. Logan, an architect, and Marian Logan, a former opera singer who later taught vocal lessons, Logan grew up in El Paso, Colorado, and Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where she briefly worked as a journalist for the Scottsbluff Republican. Her mother was of French and Irish descent.

Logan's path to the stage began in Colorado Springs, where she had traveled for her health and participated in stock theater productions. There she studied journalism under Ford Frick, who would later serve as commissioner of Major League Baseball. She subsequently moved to Chicago, where she obtained a dancing role in a stage production by misrepresenting her age. When her uncle, whom her family believed she had come to visit, discovered the deception, she lost the position. She then traveled to New York City, accompanying a theatrical troupe, and secured a small role in Florodora, a musical that marked her Broadway debut in 1920. During this period, Flo Ziegfeld hired her to dance at his Ziegfeld Roof, where she replaced Billie Donovan, who had departed for Hollywood. Concurrently, Logan modeled as a Dobbs Girl in photographs by Alfred Cheney Johnston and appeared in a comedy short produced by Johnny Hines. Her Broadway career, which spanned from 1920 to 1934, also included the play Two Strange Women in 1933 and the play Merrily We Roll Along in 1934.

Logan's screen career began after she was awarded a test opposite Ben Lyon, then an unknown actor. Working for Associated Producers, she appeared alongside Jane Peters, the future Carole Lombard, in A Perfect Crime in 1921, and that same year she co-starred with Mabel Normand in Molly O'. She was designated a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1922. Her early 1920s film work included Burning Sands and A Blind Bargain, both from 1922, followed by Sixty Cents an Hour, Java Head, and A Man Must Live in 1923 and 1924. Her co-stars during this period included Lon Chaney Sr., William Powell, Richard Dix, and Thomas Meighan, among others. The House of Youth in 1924 was identified as her first starring vehicle.

Cecil B. De Mille cast Logan in the role of Mary Magdalene in The King of Kings in 1927, a part that was widely sought by actresses of the era. The film set audience attendance records and continued to be screened somewhere in the world each day for decades following its release. When sound technology arrived, Logan's voice was recorded to accompany her performance in the originally silent film. Her transition to talkies proved difficult, though she appeared in the all-star musical The Show of Shows in 1929 and completed several early sound films for Columbia Pictures.

Logan traveled to England for stage work, including a production called Smoky Cell, which earned favorable reviews, and completed the film The Middle Watch, after which she received a Command Performance. British International Pictures signed her to write and direct, and she wrote Knock-Out in 1931 and both wrote and directed Strictly Business that same year, both of which performed successfully. Upon returning to Hollywood, she found fewer opportunities behind the camera. Columbia Pictures production chief Harry Cohn praised her work but declined to sign a female director.

Logan was married three times. Her first marriage, to Ralph James Gillespie, took place on June 4, 1925; she filed for divorce in 1927. Five months later she eloped to Tijuana with Los Angeles broker Larry Winston, and the two lived separately until her divorce from Gillespie became final in March 1928, after which she and Winston married in June of that year. She divorced Winston in 1947. Logan retired from films following her marriage in 1934. She later resided in Westchester County, New York, spending winters in Florida, and kept a prize Great Dane from the Lina Basquette Kennels at her home in Bedford Hills, New York. Logan died on April 4, 1983, in Melbourne, Florida, at the age of 80, and is buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Decatur, Illinois.