Louise Huff

Louise Huff (November 14, 1895 – August 22, 1973) was an American actress who built her career across both silent film and the Broadway stage. A descendant of President James Knox Polk, she began performing at the age of 15, touring in productions of Ben-Hur and Graustark before transitioning to motion pictures.

Huff made her film debut in 1913 with In the Bishop's Carriage and Caprice, the same year she joined Lubin Studios in Philadelphia. At Lubin she worked alongside actor and director Edgar Jones, appearing in numerous one- and two-reel melodramas and Westerns. Her sister, Justina Huff, was also a Lubin star during this period. Huff and Jones married in 1914 and had a daughter, Mary Louise, in 1915. The couple later relocated to California in the mid-1910s. Among her most notable screen roles was the ingenue opposite Jack Pickford in the Booth Tarkington comedy Seventeen in 1916. Her subsequent films were produced by Famous Players–Lasky and Paramount Pictures and included Great Expectations (1917), Mile-a-Minute Kendall (1918), Oh, You Women! (1919), and Disraeli (1921). Her final film, The Seventh Day (1922), was long considered lost until a print was discovered in a Czechoslovakian film archive.

Huff's popularity extended internationally, as demonstrated by a French novelization of her film The Crook of Dreams and tobacco trading cards issued in both Canada and the United Kingdom. She retired from film in 1922 and subsequently turned to the stage. She appeared in the Broadway production of Mary the Third in 1923 and The New Englander in 1924.

In 1920 Huff married Edwin A. Stillman, president of Watson-Stillman, a manufacturer of hydraulic machinery. They had two children, William and Nancy. In her later years she resided at 155 East 72nd Street in New York and served as a director of the Friends of the Theater and Music Collection at the Museum of the City of New York. She died at Doctors Hospital in New York on August 22, 1973.