On September 4, 1848, American stage and silent-film actress Jennie Lee was born in Sacramento, California. She began performing at the age of nine and built a long stage career, appearing alongside such celebrated actors as Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, and Helena Modjeska before moving into motion pictures in the early 1910s.
Lee appeared in more than 50 films between 1912 and 1924, often in character roles for directors including D. W. Griffith and John Ford. One of her early screen appearances came in Griffith’s 1913 short drama The Mothering Heart, in which she played the Wash Customer. The film stars Lillian Gish as a young wife whose marriage unravels, with Walter Miller as her husband.
Although Lee’s part in The Mothering Heart was small, the film remains valuable as a surviving example of the period in which a veteran of nineteenth-century American theater entered the new medium of cinema. A print of the film is preserved in the Museum of Modern Art’s film archive in New York.
Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
