Career Highlights: Brown of Harvard, The Plastic Age, The Potters
First Major Screen Credit: The Battle of the Sexes (1914)
Biography
Entering films in 1914, American actress Mary Alden was almost immediately swept into a momentous chapter of screen history. D. W. Griffith cast Mary as Lydia Brown, the mulatto housekeeper/mistress of reconstructionist senator Austin Stoneman, in the Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). Mary's big scene, which was often removed in reissue prints due to its racist/erotic content, has Lydia insisting that white senator Sumner treat her as an equal; when the senator refuses, she tears her blouse, falls to the floor, and pretends she's been sexually assaulted! Most of Mary Alden's subsequent film roles weren't quite as showy; she remained in films as a character actress into the talking era, bowing out after 1932's Strange Interlude. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Mary Alden (June 18, 1883 – July 2, 1946) was an American motion picture and stage actress. She was one of the first Broadway actresses to work in Hollywood.
Biography
Born Mary Maguire Alden in New York, New York, began her career on the Broadway stage from New Orleans, Louisiana. She spent five years on Broadway before moving to Hollywood where she worked for Biograph, Pathé, and Freres and Fine Arts in the first portion of her career. Her most popular role in movies came in Birth of a Nation directed by D.W. Griffith in 1915. Alden played the role of a mulatto girl in love with a northern politician. The following year she was in Griffith's Intolerance with Mae Marsh, Miriam Cooper, and Vera Lewis. After making Less Than The Dust with Mary Pickford in 1917, she took a temporary leave from motion pictures, acting for a while on the stage. Critics acclaimed Alden's portrayal of the mother, Mrs. Anthon, in The Old Nest (1921) and her characterization of an old lady in The Man With Two Mothers (1922). The latter feature was produced by Sam Goldwyn.
Alden was prolific as a motion picture actress throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s. A sampling of movies in which she had roles are The Plastic Age (1925), The Joy Girl (1927), Ladies of the Mob (1928), and Port of Dreams (1929). The final films she received screen credit for are Hell's House, Rasputin and the Empress, and Strange Interlude, each from 1932.