Colleen Moore

Colleen Moore was born Kathleen Morrison in Port Huron, Michigan, in 1899. Her path into the movies was pure Hollywood serendipity: an uncle in the newspaper business had done D.W. Griffith a favor over a censorship matter, and the repayment was a film contract for his stage-struck niece. She arrived in California as a teenager with dark eyes, one blue and one brown, and an appealing comic energy.

After several years of ingenue roles she made the decision that changed American culture. Cast in Flaming Youth (1923) as a reckless, jazz-loving modern girl, she cropped her hair into a blunt Dutch-boy bob and played the part with a giddy, liberated abandon that struck the 1920s like a match to kindling. Young women across the country cut their hair to match, and the movie flapper was born. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who chronicled the same generation on the page, generously said he had lit the spark of flaming youth and Colleen Moore had been the torch.

For the rest of the decade she was one of the most popular and highest-paid women in film, alternating breezy flapper comedies like Ella Cinders with more substantial dramas such as So Big. What set her apart from most of her contemporaries was a level head. Guided in part by her husband, a studio executive, she invested her enormous earnings carefully and understood the business side of stardom as few actors did.

When sound arrived and the flapper craze faded, Moore stepped away without drama or ruin, financially secure and unbothered by the fall that destroyed so many others. In later life she wrote about investing, encouraging women to manage their own money, and poured her creativity into an astonishing miniature palace, the Fairy Castle, which toured the country and delighted generations of children. She died in 1988, comfortable and content, the flapper who was smart enough to survive her own moment.