Julia Hoyt

Julia Hoyt (September 15, 1897 – October 31, 1955) was an American actress who worked in both stage and silent film, and who also built a career as a fashion entrepreneur and writer. Born Julia Wainwright Robbins in New York, New York, she was the daughter of Julian W. Robbins and Sarah Guthrie Robbins (née Jewett; 1862–1939). Her maternal grandfather, Hugh Judge Jewett, served as president of the Erie Railroad and as a congressman from Ohio.

Before establishing herself professionally, Robbins performed in charity entertainments as a debutante. During World War I, she lent her name and image to an American Red Cross campaign supporting the employment of disabled veterans. Her screen work included The Wonderful Thing (1921) alongside Norma Talmadge, The Man Who Found Himself (1925), and Camille (1926).

Her Broadway career spanned 1921 to 1931 and encompassed a wide range of productions. She appeared in a revival of Edwin Milton Royle's The Squaw Man in 1921, followed by Booth Tarkington's Rose Briar in 1922. Subsequent credits included Gladys Buchanan Unger's The Virgin of Bethulia (1925), The School for Scandal (1925), The Pearl of Great Price (1926), The Dark (1927), Mrs. Dane's Defense (1928), Bayard Veiller's Within the Law (1928), and Sherlock Holmes (1928). She continued with Serena Blandish (1929), Louis K. Anspacher's The Rhapsody (1930), The Wiser They Are (1931), and Noël Coward's Hay Fever (1931–32), the latter produced with Constance Collier.

Beyond acting, Hoyt operated a fashion business called Julia Hoyt Modes, which produced dresses and coats distributed through department stores across the United States. She also wrote syndicated articles on fashion and etiquette, and in 1924 contributed a series of dispatches from a European trip to the Bridgeport Post. She sat for portraits by several notable artists, among them Paul Helleu, John Singer Sargent, Carl Van Vechten, and Neysa McMein, whose portraits of her appeared on the covers of Woman's Home Companion in 1921 and McCall's in May 1923.

Hoyt was married three times. In 1914, at age seventeen, she wed lawyer Lydig Hoyt as his second wife; the couple had two children who died in infancy and divorced in 1924. In 1927 she married actor Louis Calhern, the same year the two appeared together in The Dark on Broadway, and divorced him in 1932. Her third marriage, in 1935, was to motion picture executive Aquila C. Giles. In the late 1930s Hoyt experienced serious health difficulties, including pneumonia contracted while at sea in 1935 and a persistent chest infection that required the surgical removal of ribs. She died of a heart attack in 1955 at the age of 58.