Peg Entwistle

The body of twenty-four-year-old Peg Entwistle was shipped to Glendale, Ohio for burial next to her father in the Oak Hill Cemetery. Elsie Ferguson was interred in the Duck River Cemetery in Old Lyme, Connecticut. When police examined the girl's belongings, in her purse they found a note that read:. A very wealthy woman with no heirs, and a lover of animals, on her passing in 1961 she left a large part of her considerable estate to a variety of charities including several for animal welfare. She then climbed the maintenance ladder to the top of the letter “H” and jumped to her death. Ferguson made her final appearance on Broadway in 1943 at the age of 60 that met with critical acclaim. There, she took off her coat and folded it into a neat bundle and placed it on the ground next to her purse. Married four times, following her final marriage at age 51 she and her husband acquired a farm in Connecticut and divided their time between it and her Cap d'Antibes home on the Mediterranean Sea in the south of France.

The depression Entwistle had been dealing with for years deepened, and on the night of September 18, after telling her uncle she was going for a walk, she made her way up the slope of Mount Lee to the foot of the giant "Hollywoodland" sign. Despite her wealth and fame and glamorous lifestyle, Elsie Ferguson's personal life had more than its share of turmoil. Desperate for any opportunity, the vulnerable girl posed topless for a small fee - but only five months after arriving in Tinseltown, she was left with no prospects, no money, and no friends. Although her voice came across well enough, at age 47 she was well past her prime for fans who wanted to see her as the great youthful beauty she had once been. Selznick production, Thirteen Women, but after this short stint, she was offered nothing else. In 1930 she made her first talkie that would also be her final film. She then obtained a minor part in a David O. In 1925 she made one film only before returning to the Broadway stage.

Peg Entwistle's theatre experience helped land her an acting job on stage, but the play closed after only a short run. It is considered her best work in film. Her uncle's bungalow was just down the street from the pathway of a high hill known as Mount Lee - where developers, in order to advertise their real estate project, had put up 50-foot-high white letters that read "H O L L Y W O O D L A N D.". One of these was the 1921 film entitled Forever in which she starred opposite the leading heartthrob of the day, Wallace Reid. Arriving there in April of 1932, she stayed at a rooming hotel for women until her money ran out, then went to live at the home of an uncle in Beachwood Canyon. In 1921, she accepted another contract offer from Paramount Pictures to star in four films to be spread over a two-year period. When he returned to New York to work on Broadway, she made the decision to move to California to find work in the motion picture industry. She fell in love with Paris and the French Riviera and within a few years bought a permanent home there.

Jobs for Entwistle proved difficult but Robert Keith had met with some success in Hollywood. In 1920, she traveled to the Middle East and Europe. The onset of the Great Depression had a severe impact on the entertainment business on the hard-hit industrialized East Coast. Elsie Ferguson eventually followed the move west and bought a home in the hills of Hollywood, California. Her family life had not been easy and she was further stressed by a brief, but very difficult, relationship at the age of 19 with actor/playwright Robert Keith (1898-1966), a divorcee and father of future actor Brian Keith. Many of the films she agreed to do were because they were adaptations of stage plays with which she was familiar. By the age of 17, Entwistle had begun to pursue a career in theatre and spent several years acting in minor roles on Broadway. Continuing to play roles of elegant society women, Ferguson was quickly dubbed "The Aristocrat of the Silent Screen." But the aristocratic label was also because she was known as a difficult and sometimes arrogant personality to work with.

Born Lillian Millicent Entwistle in Port Talbot, on Swansea Bay in Wales, her mother died when she was young and in 1922 she emigrated with her widowed father to New York City. At the peak of her popularity, several film studios offered her a contract but she declined them all until the widely respected New York based French director Maurice Tourneur proposed she appear in the lead role as a sophisticated patrician in his 1917 silent film, "Barbary Sheep". Following this first film, Elsie Ferguson starred in two more films directed by Tourneur under a lucrative contract from Paramount Pictures that paid her $1,000 per day of filming. Peg Entwistle, (July 1, 1908 - September 18, 1932), was an aspiring actress remembered for the tragic end to her young life. Ferguson, noted for her great beauty and as one of the "Park Avenue aristocrats," on one occasion is reputed to have sold $85,000.00 worth of bonds in less than an hour. P.E.". During World War I, a number of Broadway stars organized a campaign to sell Liberty Bonds from the theatre stage prior to the performance as well as at highly publicized appearances at places such as the New York Public Library. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. In 1910 she spent time on the stage in London, England.

I am sorry for everything. By 1909, she was a major Broadway star. "I am afraid, I am a coward. Raised and educated in Manhattan, she became interested in the theater at a young age and made her stage debut at seventeen as a chorus girl in a musical comedy. Born Elsie Louise Ferguson in New York City, she was the only child of a successful attorney. Elsie Ferguson, born August 19, 1883 - died November 15, 1961, was an American stage and film actress.