Lilyan Tashman

Lilyan Tashman was born on October 23, 1896, in Brooklyn, New York, to Rose (Cook) and Morris Tashman. Her parents were Jewish immigrants, her father from Bialystok, Poland, and her mother from Germany.

After toying with some stage work, she made her film debut with Experience (1921).

That was her only film of that year, and the next year she also made only one film, Head Over Heels (1922) (this was at a time when some studios and their performers were turning out a film per week).

She had no other offers for 1923, but her constant rounds of the casting offices finally did some good.

In 1924 she appeared in no less than six films. For a while she averaged about seven movies a year. Lilyan was one of a relatively few silent-era performers who easily made the transition into the sound era.

Renowned for her personal style, Tashman was one of Hollywood's leading "clothes horses" during the early 1930s.

Charged with assault in 1931, when she beat actress Alona Marlowe after catching her in husband Edmund Lowe's dressing room. The charges were later dropped. In retellings of this story, Alona is often confused with her better-known sister, June Marlowe.

Lilyan first entered a New York hospital for surgery in 1932, for what was described in the press as an appendectomy. "She was worried about her health," Tashman's friend Virginia Maxwell said after her death. "If the physicians knew she had a tumor, I don't believe they ever told her so." She continued to appear on screen despite her weakening physical health and finished her final role in Frankie and Johnny (1936) just two weeks before her death of abdominal cancer.

In 1934 she finished filming Frankie and Johnnie (1936) and went into the hospital, in New York, to have some tumors removed.