Louise Glaum on AllMovie

A dark-haired, melodramatic actress from the stage, Louise Glaum spent almost her entire screen career under the management of producer Thomas H. Ince, who cast her as femme fatales several years before the emergence of Theda Bara. In fact, Glaum could just as easily parody the vamp genre -- and according to surviving reviews did so very well in Universal Ike and the Vampire (1914) -- and in contrast to Bara, her vixens were usually at least somewhat realistic. Onscreen from at least 1912 , when she was toiling for Nestor, Hollywood's first film studio, Glaum found her greatest success opposite Western star William S. Hart, with whom she did six films altogether, including the seminal Hell's Hinges (1916). She plays the saloon belle who seduces Hart's nemesis, a fire-and-brimstone preacher of the most hypocritical sort. Glaum would play variations of that role for the remainder of her career, almost always paying for her sins in the end. A classic example of Glaum's ill-fated vamps is the still extant and very provocatively titled Sex (1920). Here, she plays a nightclub star whose selfish way of life comes back to haunt her in the person of a protégé. By then, however, Glaum's career was decidedly on the wane and she left films for good after a brief comeback attempt in 1925.