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A beautiful blonde Fox ingenue of the mid-1910s, Jean Sothern (née Brennen) had been a child actress and appeared in vaudeville prior to her entering films in 1915. That year, she was paired with the studio's reigning femme fatale, Theda Bara, in The Two Orphans, with a toned-down Bara as the brave Henriette and Sothern as the blind Louise. She became a serial star the following year, playing the title-role in Pathé's The Mysteries of Myra, which featured an underground city, witchcraft, occult scientists and a cult of magicians known as The Black Order. The notoriety of the serial earned Sothern a contract with the new Art Dramas and she starred in such melodramas as Miss Deception (1917) and A Mother's Ordeal (1917). By then she was visibly ailing and in 1921 she was diagnosed with incurable cancer. A different Jean Sothern (1893-1964) appeared in films in the late '30s.