Ivy Close on AllMovie

Having won a magazine beauty contest, Ivy Close went on to become one of England's first screen favorites, appearing in scores of mainly low-budget melodramas of life among the landed gentry, most of them eminently forgettable. In contrast, La Roue (1922), running approximately nine hours and produced in France by Abel Gance, was everything but forgettable. But filming of this major silent work took more than two years, and although Close earned favorable reviews for her performance as Norma -- the foundling who falls in love with her foster-brother -- she found herself all but forgotten by her erstwhile fans in Great Britain. Retiring in 1929, Close's greatest contribution to the screen proved in retrospect to be her son, the director Ronald Neame.