Career Highlights: Quality Street, Lover's Island, The Early Bird
First Major Screen Credit: Lessons in Love (1921)
Biography
British actress Flora Finch left the theater behind when she entered the infant American film industry in 1909. While at the Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn, Finch was teamed with porcine star comedian John Bunny in a series of extremely popular domestic farces. Finch and John were among the first film actors to be identified by name on the screen, and as a result the audience demanded more and more "Bunnyfinches". When John Bunny died suddenly in 1915, Finch's career was finished, though she didn't know it at the time. She set up her own production company to produce short comedies, which were distinguished only by their vulgarity and lack of genuine humor. By the 1920s, Finch was playing minor roles in the feature films of others. Flora Finch hung on in the business as a bit player and extra until her death in 1940; her last role of any consequence was the fleeting part of "Maw", the bearded miner's wife, in Laurel and Hardy's Way Out West (1937). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
She was born into a music-hall and traveling theatrical family in London and was brought over to the states as a young child. She kept up the family tradition and worked in theater and vaudeville circuit right up until her 30s.
Starting in 1910 at Vitagraph, she was paired with John Bunny for the first of 160 very popular shorts made between 1910 and 1915. These shorts, known as "Bunnygraphs", "Bunnyfinches", and "Bunnyfinchgraphs", established them as the first popular comedy team in motion pictures.
After Bunny's death in 1915 she continued to make comedy shorts, but with less success. She started her own production company, "Flora Finch Productions", but was never able to regain her popularity. She found film work in the sound era, but only in small supporting parts; The Scarlet Letter (1934) gave her one of her more substantial roles in talking pictures. Her last film was The Women (1939).