Mae Murray

Dazzling blonde star of the silent screen, a self-described "golden dragonfly" who made "Sunset Boulevard"'s Norma Desmond seem as normal as apple pie. Brought up by her grandmother, Murray was dancing before she was a teenager, and in her 20s appeared in the "Ziegfeld Follies" of 1908, 1909 and 1915. She also jumped on the ballroom dancing bandwagon of the times and made a name for herself as a minor-league Irene Castle. Paramount's Adolph Zukor discovered her in 1915 and whisked her off to Hollywood, where he tried to make her into a second Mary Pickford in films like "To Have and to Hold" (her first, 1915), Cecil B. DeMille's "The Dream Girl" (1916), and "Princess Virtue" (1917). Several of her films were directed by Robert Z Leonard, whom Murray married in 1918. In 1917, she and Leonard joined Universal, where they opened their own production unit, Bluebird.