Marion Davies

Marion Davies Filmography
Marion Davies Gallery

Marion Davies is better known as the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, than an actress, but judging by the glimpses of her few films that are available this looks unfair. The massive amounts of publicity created by Hearst for Marion probably did her more harm than good with the antagonism she received from the movie industry. She was born in January 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, she entered the movies in 1917, when Hearst opened The Cosmopolitan Picture Company, which made and financed her movies for the rest of her career. Over the next ten years Marions film career met with mixed success, highlights being "Little Old New York" (1923), "Janice Meredith" (1924), "Zander The Great" (1925) and the superb "Show People" (1928), which included cameos by Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert and Charles Chaplin.

Marion made her last film in 1937 and was then embroiled in controversy with the release of Orson Welles film "Citizen Kane" (1941) which mirrored to a degree the lives of Marion and W R Hearst and depicted Susan Alexander Kane(Marion) as weak and untalented. Marion and Hearst were together for thirty years, until his death, then she married ten weeks later and became a successful business woman. Marion died in September 1961, her autobiography "The Times We Had" was released posthumously in 1976 from audio tapes that she had left behind.