Mignon Anderson

Mignon Anderson was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1892. Her father was a former vaudeville performer and opera singer who left the stage to go into the insurance business. Her mother, Hallie Howard, was also a former vaudeville performer. Mignon got her show-business start at a very early age--at six months old she appeared in a stage production as the infant daughter of the leading lady. She grew into quite a beautiful young woman, and easily found work as an artists' model. She made her film debut in 1911 with the Thanhouser Company in Robert Emmet (1911). Her popularity grew and she became renowned not only for her beauty and acting work, but for her somewhat notorious (for the time) private life--her nickname among her fellow Thanhouser actors was "Filet Mignon". She was romantically linked to such show-business personalities as Val Hush and Irving Cummings. She and Cumming eventually became engaged, but the relationship fell apart and they never married. She did, however, wind up marrying another Thanhouser actor, J. Morris Foster, in 1915. They remained married until Foster's death in 1966. In 1917 she signed with Universal Pictures but left the studio a year later. While there she appeared in such pictures as The Hunted Man (1917) and A Young Patriot (1917). After leaving Universal she freelanced, appearing mainly in films for small independent studios, such as Metro's The Claim (1918), Republic Distributing's Mountain Madness (1920) and Peerless' The Heart of a Woman (1920). She and her husband took about a year off from films in 1919 to appear on the stage, and did it again in the late 1920s. Mignon Anderson died in Los Angeles, California, on February 25, 1983.