AllMovie

Remembered today for her roles in several Lois Weber films -- including the anti-abortion drama Where Are My Children? and The Blot (1921) -- American silent screen actress Marie Walcamp was once a major star of Westerns and serials. Walcamp had entered films in 1913 in The Werewolf and three years later appeared in Weber's social melodrama Hop -- The Devil's Brew. The brass at Universal saw her as an action heroine and starred the blonde Ohio girl as Liberty, a Daughter of the U.S.A. (1916) opposite a young Jack Holt. She battled a lion in the appropriately titled The Lion's Claws(1916), her second chapterplay, and wore the scars for the rest of her life. The 1920s brought an end to women's dominance in all aspects of filmmaking, however, and Marie Walcamp's screen career waned precipitously. She married actor Harlan Tucker and semi-retired, leaving films altogether in 1927. Long out of the public eye, an ailing Marie Walcamp committed suicide by ingesting an overdose of pain killers. Sadly, her only surviving films, the aforementioned Where Are My Children? and The Blot, are hardly representative of this pioneering action heroine whose popularity in the mid-1910s nearly rivaled serial queens Pearl White, Ruth Roland, and Helen Holmes.