Brunette silent film leading lady Marguerite De La Motte was trained as a ballet dancer (early publicity reports claim that she was instructed by Anna Pavlova). In films from 1918, Marguerite climbed to fame as the protégé of star Douglas Fairbanks Sr. She was the heroine in such Fairbanks costumers as The Mark of Zorro (1920) and The Three Musketeers (1921), and co-starred in Doug's last "contemporary" comedy of the 1920s, The Nut (1921). After making her last appearance with Fairbanks in 1929's The Iron Mask, Marguerite had trouble adjusting to talkies, and was out of pictures by 1934, save for a brief comeback in the 1942 PRC film Reg'lar Fellers. Marguerite De La Motte was once married to movie leading man John Bowers, whose 1936 suicide-by-drowning has led many historians to believe that the stormy Bowers/De La Motte marriage was the inspiration for the classic "inside Hollywood" film A Star is Born (1937).
by Hal Erickson
biography
