A graduate of Brooklyn's Manual High School, blonde, blue-eyed Edna Murphy was a model for photographer Lajaren Hiller prior to making her screen debut opposite Alice Joyce in To the Highest Bidder (1918). She played a vamp in the classic tearjerker Over the Hill (To the Poorhouse) (1920) and was then awarded the leading female role opposite Johnnie Walker in the Fox serial Fantomas (1920). Walker, who had starred in Over the Hill as well, became Murphy's leading man in four subsequent Fox melodramas, but their partnership ended when she signed with Universal in 1922. After a handful of programmers in which she mainly played flappers, Murphy defected to Pathé, who cast her in the ten-chapter series Her Dangerous Path (1923), produced by Hal Roach and co-starring a non-comedic Charley Chase, and awarded her the female lead in the Western serial Leatherstocking (1924). The exposure from both made her one of the season's most visible actresses. There would be two more serials to come -- Into the Net (1924) and Fingerprints (1931), the latter a talkie -- but her career was decidedly on the wane at the changeover to sound. She married director Mervyn LeRoy in 1927 and retired three years later.
by Hans J. Wollstein
biography
