Lenore Ulric
Lenore Ulric (July 21, 1892 – December 30, 1970) was a star of the Broadway stage and Hollywood films of the silent-film and early sound era. Her father, Franz Xavier Ulrich, was a United States Army hospital steward. He reportedly named his daughter Lenore due to his fondness for the Edgar Allan Poe poem, "The Raven". She later dropped the "h" from her surname, using the name Lenore Ulric as her acting name.
Early Theater and Silent Films
As a schoolgirl, Lenore obtained a job with a stock company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She played with stock companies in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Chicago, Illinois. She worked briefly as a film actress for Essanay Studios and joined another stock company in Schenectady, New York. She found work in The First Man (1911), A Polished Burglar (1911), Kilmeny (1915), and The Better Woman (1915). In 1915 she went to work for Pallas Pictures starring in several pictures that survive today at the Library of Congress.
Broadway
Just before she was discovered by theatrical producer David Belasco, Miss Ulric toured in a road company of The Bird of Paradise. She wrote to Belasco and in the fall of 1915 she made her New York debut at the Princess Theater in The Mark of the Beast. Soon she played the lead in The Heart of Wetona. Under Belasco's management Lenore played a variety of female roles. She was an Indian maid in Tiger Rose, a French-Canadian heroine in The Son-Daughter, and a Chinese girl in Kiki. One of Ulric's biggest hits for Belasco was in 1926's Lulu Belle where she played a prostitute, a genre that spawned several Broadway hits in the 1920s.