All All. Sign In. Favourite actresses from the 's Silent Era. This list includes actresses who had their career breakthrough and rose to prominence during the silent era. What's important is to give a picture that is consistent with what cinema looked like during that decade.
Of course, just because an actress is in this list does not mean that her career stopped there. Some actresses had a long career span and illuminated our screens with their talent and beauty over several decades. List activity. Annette Kellerman. She was married to James R. She died on 5 November in Southport, Australia. Nell Shipman. Canadian-born actress, writer, producer and animal trainer Nell Shipman was best known for writing and acting in several James Oliver Curwood stories and for her portrayals of strong, adventurous women, with many of her productions being filmed in Canada.
Her son, Barry Shipman , became a prolific screenwriter, mostly of westerns. Asta Nielsen. Actress Producer Director Hamlet Danish leading woman of German films who became one of the greatest stars of the silent era. A native of the Copenhagen suburb of Vesterbro, Nielsen was the daughter of a coppersmith and a washerwoman, both of whom died before Nielsen was fifteen. Her stage debut came as a child in the chorus of the Kongelige Teater's production of Boito's opera "Mephistopheles.
She toured Scandinavia and became one of the highest-paid and most popular stage actresses of her time and place. In , director Urban Gad suggested that the silent screen would allow her to transcend her Danish language barrier, and she agreed appear in his film 'Afgrunden '. The film was successful and Nielsen was encouraged to continue in this new art form. Nielsen and her director, Gad, whom she had married, went to Germany and spent the next quarter century there. She became one of the true superstars of the silent screen, a tragic heroine whose photograph during the First World War accompanied German and also British and French troops into battle.
Among her notable films after the war was a version of "Hamlet, " which was not so much a Shakespearean film as it was an exploration of a then-current theory that the real Hamlet had been, in fact, a woman. Nielsen played the title role. She continued to play a wide variety of roles in Germany and occasionally in Denmark and Norway, never losing the respect and popularity she had maintained almost from the beginning of her career. She abandoned her film work just as sound was taking over the industry.
