Marie Empress

Marie Empress, born Mary Ann Louisa Taylor on 26 March 1884 in Birmingham, was a British actress who worked on stage and in silent films in both England and America. Her father was a contractor. She occasionally claimed descent from the actor Edmund Kean, describing herself as his great-grand niece.

Empress launched her stage career in England, where she performed as a male impersonator and appeared in variety shows. She crossed to America and made her Broadway debut in the musical The Little Cafe in 1913. She subsequently moved into motion pictures, starring in a substantial number of silent films. Her screen credits include Old Dutch (1915), The Stubbornness of Geraldine (1915), The Woman Pays (1915), When We Were Twenty-One (1915), Behind Closed Doors (1916), Sibyl's Scenario (1916), Love's Cross Roads (1916), The Chorus Girl and the Kid (1916), A Lesson from Life (1916), The Woman Redeemed (1916), The Girl Who Doesn't Know (1916), and The Guilty Woman (1919). Her film roles frequently involved lurid vamp characters, and press coverage did not always draw a clear distinction between the actress and the parts she played.

In her personal life, Empress married a dentist named William Horton in 1902. The couple separated in 1906 and formally divorced in 1918. Accounts of her private life included references to intense romantic relationships, suspected drug use, and unexplained scars.

In October 1919, Empress was a passenger aboard the Cunard ocean liner SS Orduña. Fellow passengers had observed that she consistently wore a veil and dressed in black throughout the voyage. She was last seen in her stateroom the day before the ship was due to dock in New York City. Reports indicated she had been brought a glass of water on the Sunday evening, but by the following morning her cabin was empty and her bed had not been slept in. She was presumed to have gone overboard and drowned at the age of 35. The precise date of her death was never established. Rumors circulated that she had not died but had disembarked in disguise as a publicity stunt, though no evidence supported this. Her will was proven and publicly announced in November 1921, with her death assumed to have occurred on 25 October 1919 or at some point thereafter.