Lilyan Tashman

Lilyan Tashman, born Lillian Tashman on October 23, 1896, in Brooklyn, New York, was an American actress whose career spanned stage, silent film, and sound film. The youngest of eight children, she was born into a Jewish family to Morris Tashman, a manufacturer of children's clothes, and his wife Rose Cook Tashman. Her siblings were named Bertha, Kitty, Jennie, Annie, Sarah, Gustav, and Hattie, and her paternal grandparents were Isaac and Rose Schlomowitz Tashman. After attending high school in Brooklyn, she completed her education at a finishing school. Before pursuing performance, Tashman worked as a model, her blonde hair and distinctive appearance drawing the attention of artists who hired her regularly.

Tashman's stage career began in 1913 when she appeared in the chorus of Her Little Highness, launching a Broadway presence that would continue through 1924. She performed in the 1916 and 1917 editions of the Ziegfeld Follies and appeared in several other Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. productions, among them The Century Girl in 1916, Dance and Grow Thin in 1917, and Miss 1917 that same year. By 1914, she had also taken up work in vaudeville, appearing on a bill alongside Eddie Cantor and Al Lee. She and Lee married that year, though the two separated in 1920 and divorced in 1921. Among her other Broadway credits were The Gold Diggers, Garden of Weeds, Barnum Was Right, Lady Bug, and Night. In 1919, producer David Belasco cast her in The Gold Diggers, starring Ina Claire, in which Tashman took a supporting role and also served as Claire's understudy. The production ran for two years.

Tashman entered film in 1921 with Experience, alongside Richard Barthelmess and Nita Naldi. Following a difficult stretch in New York during which one show closed and she was dismissed from another, she relocated to Hollywood. Her early film work included a supporting role in the Mabel Normand picture Head Over Heels in 1922. Her stage role in Garden of Weeds led directly to her being cast in the 1924 film adaptation of the same material. Subsequent film credits included Pretty Ladies, Seven Days and Texas Steer in 1926, Camille in 1927, So This Is Paris and Craig's Wife in 1928, The Trial of Mary Dugan and The Marriage Playground and The Gold Diggers of Broadway in 1929, and the pre-Production Code comedy Girls About Town in 1931. She transitioned smoothly into talking pictures, her years of stage work having given her a rich contralto voice and assured delivery of dialogue.

While filming Ports of Call in 1925, Tashman met actor Edmund Lowe, whom she married on September 21, 1925. The couple made their home in Hollywood, residing in an Art Deco house thought to have been designed by Tashman herself. Both continued their individual acting careers while entertaining extensively at their Beverly Hills home, and Tashman became a regular presence on best-dressed lists. Writer William J. Mann addressed their marriage in his book Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910–1969, noting that marriage offered them greater social mobility as an institution, and writing that shared sexual orientation need not discount the affection and commitment between them.

After an especially active 1931 in which Tashman appeared in eight films, she began scaling back her work as press speculation about her health increased. She repeatedly denied any serious illness and, following a hospitalization, attributed her condition publicly to an appendectomy. It was only after her death that the true cause was disclosed. Tashman died on March 21, 1934, at 2:15 at Doctor's Hospital, 170 East End Avenue, New York City, at the age of 37. Hospital authorities identified the cause as an advanced tumorous condition, and she had been conscious until the end, with Edmund Lowe at her bedside. She had undergone an operation the previous Friday. At the time of her death, the couple maintained a residence at 73 East 70th Street in New York. Rabbi Dr. Samuel H. Goldenson of Temple Emanu-El conducted the funeral service at the Universal Funeral Chapel, 597 Lexington Avenue. Tashman was subsequently interred at the plot of the Palestine Lodge 71, I.O.S.B., Washington Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.