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Great Britain's first true screen star, brunette Alma Taylor gained her greatest popularity playing one of the two sprightly "Tilly girls" in a series of comedies produced by Hepworth in 1910-1911. The other Tilly girl was Chrissie White and each in her own way would come to personify the typical British silent screen heroine: innocuous, well-mannered, and invariably dressed for comfort. Taylor, who at one point was favorably compared to America's Mary Pickford, found her career waning after World War I and she was decidedly long in the tooth when producer/director Cecil M. Hepworth decided to remake the already then old-fashioned Comin' Thro the Rye in 1923. Taylor played her usual heroine, suffering nobly and at great length after losing her man to another woman. One critic dismissed the film as poor melodrama, complaining that the starring role was not played by Taylor but by "a field in which the rye, as far as I remember, failed to function obediently." Due to a slump in British film production, Taylor disappeared until 1926, when Hepworth launched a comeback of sorts with The House of Marney, and she did a couple of thrillers in Germany, including a version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1929). Once the darling of British movie audiences and the wife of prolific film producer Walter West, Alma Taylor was reduced to minor bit parts in sound films until her retirement in the late '50s.