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A matronly actress no longer in the bloom of youth, silver-haired Maude George was transformed by iconoclastic director Erich Von Stroheim into a distinctive erotic presence, first as a modiste in the now-lost The Devil's Passkey (1920) and then, memorably, as the fake Princess Olga in Foolish Wives (1922). Von Stroheim cast the actress a third time, as a madam, in Merry-Go-Round (1923), but when the director was summarily replaced with Rupert Julian, George emerged as little more than a minor supporting presence. She played aristocrats, real or fake, in many other films in the 1920s, but only Stroheim seems to have cultivated what he termed her "corrupt sophistication." She was more corrupt than sophisticated in her final Stroheim film, The Wedding March (1926), playing the cigar-puffing Princess Wildeliebe-Rauffenburg. Maude George retired at the changeover to sound.