Rose Tapley

Birthday: Jun 30, 1881

Bio: One of the very few stage actresses to embrace motion pictures in the earliest days of the industry, Rose Tapley had starred for ten years opposite Sidney Olcott in such plays as Sign of the Cross, The Lion and the Mouse, and Vanity Fair prior to making her screen bow with Biograph around 1906. By 1909, she was with Vitagraph where she later recreated Vanity Fair… More Bio: One of the very few stage actresses to embrace motion pictures in the earliest days of the industry, Rose Tapley had starred for ten years opposite Sidney Olcott in such plays as Sign of the Cross, The Lion and the Mouse, and Vanity Fair prior to making her screen bow with Biograph around 1906. By 1909, she was with Vitagraph where she later recreated Vanity Fair (1911) and played Queen Victoria (to Julia Swayne Gordon's Florence Nightingale) in The Victoria Cross(1911). Tapley, who at one point took to touring America with a plea for "better pictures," became very popular in Vitagraph's Mr. Jarr comedies in 1915 (she was Mrs. Jarr to Harry Davenport's title character) before settling into a long career as a supporting actress. Today, Tapley is best remembered as one of the snobbish welfare ladies in Clara Bow's It (1927) and as Princess Sophya to Lupe Velez' Katusha in Universal's 1931 version of Tolstoy's Resurrection. Long after her retirement, she died at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi