AllMovie

A silent star of some magnitude, brunette Marguerite Snow ("Peggy" to her friends), is perhaps best remembered as the wife of actor/director James Cruze, opposite whom she starred in innumerable one- and two-reel melodramas for the New York-based Thanhouser Company between 1911 and 1915, including a still extant version of H. Rider Haggard's She (1911). The daughter of a minstrel performer, Snow made her Broadway debut in 1909 and went on to perform opposite the likes of James O'Neill (father of Eugene) and Thomas Jefferson. She made her screen debut in a 1911 Thanhouser production entitled Baseball in Bloomers but the experience, which involved changing into a rather skimpy outfit in the middle of a New York winter, so repelled the young actress that she immediately returned to Broadway. She was back soon enough, however, and along with Florence LaBadie and Mignon Anderson, became one of Thanhouser's most important stars, acclaimed as Countess Olga, the villainess of the 1914 serial The Million Dollar Mystery. The Cruzes, who had wed in 1913, left Thanhouser in 1915, in favor of California, where Snow became a leading lady for newcomer Metro. She never regained the stature she had enjoyed at Thanhouser, however, and the marriage to Cruze was dissolved in 1922, shortly before he embarked on his most famous project, the first true epic Western, The Covered Wagon (1923). Miss Snow later married comedian Neeley Edwards and retired from performing in the mid-'20s. At the time of her death from kidney failure, the veteran leading lady was residing at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California.