Pauline Curley

Pauline Curley (December 19, 1903 – December 16, 2000) was a vaudeville performer, stage actress, and silent film actress born in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Her mother, Rose Curley, introduced her to show business at the age of four, initially through vaudeville performances. By 1910, when Curley was six years old, Rose brought her to New York City to pursue work in both the emerging silent film industry and on the stage. During this period she took on bit parts in films and performed weekly in stage productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Little Lord Fauntleroy for the Jack Packard Stock Company.

Curley's first motion picture credit was Tangled Relations (1912), in which she played one of the children alongside Florence Lawrence and Owen Moore. Two years later, she auditioned for The Straight Road (1914) dressed as a boy to secure a role as an orphan, a casting approach that led to a series of similar parts. In 1914 she appeared on Broadway in Polygamy. The following year she played the ingenue Claudia Frawley in Life Without Soul (1915), an adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and also appeared in the role of Rhods in Polygamy at the Park Theatre. Her mother provided different ages for Curley depending on the demands of a given role, a practice that left Curley uncertain of her actual birth year until 1998, when she was 94.

In 1917, Rose took Curley to Hollywood in pursuit of better-paying work. She was cast as Princess Irina of Russia in Herbert Brenon's The Fall of the Romanovs, which Variety identified as her best-known film. That same year she appeared in several additional productions, including The Square Deceiver, Cassidy, and A Case at Law. In 1918 she served as leading lady in five films, among them King Vidor's first full-length feature, The Turn in the Road, and Bound in Morocco, a farcical adventure in which she supported Douglas Fairbanks and Tully Marshall. In 1920 she appeared in The Invisible Hand, a Vitagraph serial directed by William J. Bauman and co-starring Brinsley Shaw and Antonio Moreno, which marked her first Western. The Western genre subsequently dominated the remainder of her film career. In 1926 she appeared in The Naked Truth alongside Helen Chadwick, Jack Mulhall, and Emmett King.

Curley married cinematographer Kenneth Peach in 1922 and took the name Pauline Curley Peach. They remained married until his death in 1988, a union of nearly 66 years, and had three children together — two sons and one daughter. She retired from acting at approximately age 25, around 1929, though she maintained a connection to the film industry through her husband's career. Curley died on December 16, 2000, eight days before her 97th birthday, of complications from pneumonia at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica.