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Betty Compson

Petite, fair-haired, beautiful and highly-paid leading lady of the silent era. Billed in vaudeville as 'The Vagabond Violinist', Compson was signed in 1915 for a series of Al Christie comedy shorts. She made her dramatic debut as a member of a confidence gang in "The Miracle Man" (1919) and went on to star in dozens of films both in the USA and England (among them "The Little Minister," "Rustle of Silk," "The White Flower," "Wise Guy" and "Twelve Miles Out"). She was memorable as a dejected prostitute rescued from suicide in Josef von Sternberg's highly stylized "Docks of New York" (1928), as the assistant to a mad ventriloquist (Erich Von Stroheim) in her then-husband, James Cruze's "The Great Gabbo" (1929) and in Hitchcock's "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" (1941).