Sally Phipps

Sally Phipps, born Nellie Bernice Bogdon on May 25, 1911, in Oakland, California, was an American actress whose career spanned silent film, early sound pictures, and Broadway. The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Edward Bogdon, she attended Tamalpais High School and worked as a sales clerk in a San Francisco department store before entering the entertainment industry. She later attended Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, where director Frank Borzage discovered her and brought her to Fox Film.

Phipps made her first screen appearance at the age of three, billed as Bernice Sawyer, in the 1914 Essanay Studio production Broncho Billy and the Baby, filmed in Niles, California. She returned to the Essanay lot in early 1915 for two additional Broncho Billy westerns, The Western Way and The Outlaw's Awakening. More than a decade later, Fox Film assigned her the stage name Sally Phipps in 1926, when she was fifteen years old. Her first work at the studio consisted of two-reel comedies, beginning with Light Wines and Bearded Ladies in 1926, followed by Girls and Gentlemen Prefer Scotch in 1927. Her feature debut came in Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl in 1926, and her first starring role in a feature was Love Makes 'Em Wild in 1927. That same year she was named one of the thirteen WAMPAS Baby Stars. In August 1927 she signed a five-year contract with Sol M. Wurtzel, personal secretary to William Fox, with a starting weekly wage of $125 rising to $600 per week during the contract's final six months.

Among her most popular Fox features was High School Hero, which opened in late 1927 opposite leading man Nick Stuart. She and Stuart were reunited for the 1928 productions Why Sailors Go Wrong and News Parade, while None but the Brave that same year co-starred Charles Morton. News Parade, a film centered on a Fox News cameraman and the daughter of a camera-shy millionaire, was shot on location in New York City, Lake Placid, Palm Beach, and Havana. Phipps also appeared in a cameo in F.W. Murnau's Sunrise. Her final Fox appearance was in the 1929 sound two-reeler Detectives Wanted, starring Clark and McCullough.

Phipps made her Broadway debut in 1930 in Once in a Lifetime, the Kaufman and Hart comedy satirizing Hollywood, in which she played Susan Walker, a movie-struck ingenue. The production ran through 1931. During the same period she appeared opposite Joe Penner in the 1931 Vitaphone two-reel comedy Where Men Are Men, playing a Western comedy vamp named Nancy Carter. In 1935 she returned to Broadway in Knock on Wood, written by Allen Rivkin, again portraying a movie-struck ingenue; for that production she used the stage name Sallie Phipps.

In her personal life, Phipps married Gimbels department-store heir Benedict Gimbel Jr., grandson of Adam Gimbel, on June 6, 1931, and relocated to Philadelphia; the couple divorced in 1935. In 1941 she married New York musician Alfred Marion Harned in Coyoacan, Mexico. They had two children, Maryanna and Robert, both born in Des Moines, Iowa, and divorced in 1956.

Phipps died on March 17, 1978, at Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, at the age of sixty-six. In the summer of 2019, the Sally Phipps Archive was accepted into the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood, California, where it is held as the Sally Phipps Papers. The collection includes scene stills from her Fox, Essanay, and Warner Brothers Vitaphone productions, photographs from her two Broadway shows, publicity and pinup photos, 16mm film prints, lobby cards, posters, glass slides, theater programs, and heralds.