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- Fannie Ward was a star of light comedies on Broadway and in vaudeville. Internationally famous, she was at the height of her career in the first decade of the 20th century. She debuted on Broadway at 19 in "Pippino" (1890). She went on to starring roles in "The Marriage of William Ashe", "Madam President" and "The Shop Girl". Although she was a good deal older than ideal for the role of the young spendthrift wife of a Wall Street tycoon, she made her screen debut in Cecil B. DeMille's production of The Cheat (1915). The film is a spectacular DeMille morality tale and features a shocking scene in which Ward's character is branded and nearly raped by a dapper but sinister Japanese ivory baron played by Sessue Hayakawa. She went on to star in several successful melodramas, the plots of most of which revolved around her near loss of virtue to a selection of nefarious characters. She was married to actor Jack Dean, who also appeared in at least 15 of her 26 films. Known as "The Youth Girl," she was continually cast in roles that were 20 to 30 years younger than her actual age. By the time she retired from the screen in 1920, she was just too old to carry it off anymore, and "The Youth Girl" sobriquet had become more of a joke than an honest tribute. After retiring from the screen, she opened a beauty palace in Paris called "The Fountain of Youth."
- Stannard Mears was born on 5 August 1873 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He was a writer, known for Seventeen (1940). He was married to Edna. He died on 27 January 1952 in Cliffside, New Jersey, USA.
- American novelist and playwright Owen Johnson was born in New York City in 1878. The literary world was in his blood--his father was a magazine editor--and when Owen was six years old he had his first story published (he was paid the grand sum of $1.00). At age 12 he and a friend put out their own newspaper. He attended the private Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where he founded and edited the "Lawrenceville Literary Magazine" (he later used Lawrenceville as the setting for quite a few of his novels, with many of the characters based on his schoolmates and friends). He attended Yale University and was chairman of the "Yale Literary Magazine". He graduated Yale with the class of 1900, receiving his B.A. in 1901 (in 1910 he attracted attention--and scandal--with his novel "Stover at Yale", which attacked the pretentiousness and inane rituals of the "senior societies" that predominated at the university, and also excoriated what he saw as the lack of curiosity and indolence of the younger undergraduates). After graduation he published a novel about the American Civil War, "Arrows of the Almighty", and married the first of his five wives.
He fought in France with the US Army during World War I, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French government. In 1929 he and his fifth wife moved to New York City. He died in Tisbury, MA, in 1952.