May Allison on AllMovie

Blonde and delicate-looking, May Allison made her debut as the ingenue in A Fool There Was (1914), but that film became Theda Bara's star-making vamp breakthrough, and Allison failed to make much of an impression. She needed a strong partner in order to shine onscreen and Allison found him in Harold Lockwood, an equally fair-haired leading man; together they became the very picture of World War I romance in a series of programmers that, although popular, all seemed to run together. Tragically, Lockwood became one of the most famous victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic and without him, Allison's career lost its momentum. Audiences thought they were a couple offscreen as well as on, but she married instead the actor/writer Robert Ellis. After the divorce, she wed -- rather more famously -- James Quirk, the editor of the influential fan magazine Photoplay. He left her a widow in 1932 and she married a third time, a union that lasted for forty years. May Allison died at the ripe old age of 99, seven decades after making her last film, The Telephone Girl (1927).