by Hans J. Wollstein
biography
A popular stage soubrette, brunette Octavia Handworth (born Boas) entered films with the French Pathé company in 1912. She became a star with the Lubin Mfg. Company of Philadelphia in the mid-1910s, starring in such melodramas as When Fate Leads Trump (1914) and The Path Forbidden (1914). The latter was a major undertaking in which Handworth played no less than three roles: a wayward wife and mother and the twins she leaves behind. Two years later Handworth appeared in a rather notorious anti-abortion melodrama, Race Suicide, but by then her screen career was decidedly on the wane and her subsequent roles were few and far between.
