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One of the early stars of the silent screen, Marie Doro was born Marie K. Steward in Duncannon, Pennsylvania on 25 May 1882.  As with most of the screen's earliest stars, Marie Doro's career began on the stage in 1915 as one of producer Adolph Zukor's Famous Players, where under the management of Charles Frohman she won considerable acclaim for her performances, including the title role in a revival of "Oliver Twist" in 1912.  Her start in films came with a starring role as Carlotta in "The Morals of Marcus" in 1915.  The following year she reprised her role as Dickens' little orphan boy in the 1916 film version of "Oliver Twist," one of the earliest ever produced.  Around this same time, she entered into a brief union with vaudeville and silent screen actor Elliot Dexter, which may have been a marriage of mutual convenience.

A classically trained performer, Marie Doro was known and admired for her expertise on the subjects of Shakespeare and Elizabethan poetry.  She was deeply spiritual and studied religion at New York's Union Theological Seminary.  Increasingly reclusive, Doro would often go on self-styled "retreats" and would go to extremes to elude friends and acquantainces during these times, even changing hotels four times a week. Not long after befriending de Acosta, Doro left films, with her last being 1924's "Sally Bishop," in which she played the title role.  In a time when very young teenagers (Mary Miles Minter, Lucille Ricksen) played leading ladies, Doro was a case of too little, too late, and she left America for Europe. Following a couple of Italian films and Sally Bishop in the U.K. in 1924, Doro disappeared from radar.The rest of her life was largely spent in seclusion.

When Marie Doro died from heart failure in 1956, film and the theater may have forgotten her, but she did not forget them.  Her will allocated $90,000 to the Actor's Fund.