American actress Marie Prevost was convent-educated in Montreal before heading to Los Angeles as a high schooler. Prevost gave up a stenographer's job in 1917 to become one of the bathing beauties at Mack Sennett studios. Several years of playing ingenues for Sennett came to an end when she signed at Universal Studios in 1921; her career really got started, however, during her stay at Warner Bros., where she was fortunate enough to be cast in a series of such popular sophisticated comedies as director Ernst Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle (1924). Talking pictures forced Prevost to alter her image; her nasal, high-pitched voice was more suited to wisecracking chorus girls or gum-chewing receptionists than pampered society wives. Prevost was cast in a few good supporting parts throughout the '30s, notably as Carole Lombard's manicurist chum in Hands Across the Table (1936). Marie Prevost died in 1937 at the age of 38.
by Hal Erickson
biography
