Occupation Actress Years active 1923–1926 | Name Dorothy Seastrom Role Film actress | |
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Born February 16, 1903 ( 1903-02-16 ) Spouse Francis Corby (m. 1924–1930) Movies The Call of the Canyon, We Moderns, Pretty Ladies Similar People Monta Bell, John Francis Dillon, Victor Fleming, Ellen Corby | ||
Dorothy Seastrom (March 16, 1903 – January 31, 1930) was an American silent film actress.
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Early life and career
Born in Texas, Seastrom got into acting after winning the a beauty competition. Her family later relocated to Chicago. Her film career began in 1923 with the role of Eleanor Harmon in The Call of the Canyon, directed by Victor Fleming. Later she acted under the direction of Cecil B. Demille. She signed a five-year contract with First National Pictures in September 1925. Seastrom was called the "Candy Kid" at First National due to her taffy colored hair.
She appeared in The Perfect Flapper with Colleen Moore and Classified with Corinne Griffith. Seastrom barely avoided a potentially disfiguring accident during the filming of We Moderns (1925). A shower of sparks from a short-circuited light fell upon her hair and shoulders at the United Studios. Seastrom escaped injury when assistant director James Dunne grabbed a table cloth from a prop table and covered the actress' head. Electricians shut off the power to a light which hung from the Fly system above the scene. Seastrom made a full recovery from the burns she sustained. She returned to complete the film.
Death
Due to declining health, Seastrom returned to Dallas for a rest in the fall of 1925 where she became ill. Physicians ordered her to a rest sanatorium for several months. It was feared that if she continued working, she would be forced out of movies completely. First National management agreed to hold the starting date of her contract temporarily, until she regained her health. She lost a role in Irene (1926), which she was scheduled to make with Colleen Moore. Her frail strength and a hard work regimen left her a victim of tuberculosis.
She was taken by her husband, Francis Corby to a sanatorium in California to recuperate. In 1926, Seastrom returned and appeared in her final film It Must Be Love. (The widower Corby wed a young script girl turned actress named Ellen Hansen in 1934; they divorced a decade later, in 1944.) Seastrom died of tuberculosis in Dallas on January 31, 1930, aged 26.