This is part of a series showing what the silent stars featured in the 1917 Kromo Gravure Trading Card set were up to at the precise moment in time covered in a 1932 Motion Picture Magazine article, Stars Who Have Vanished by Jack Grant.
I've been using the IMDb, Wikipedia, my physical bookshelf, and especially the NewspaperArchive.com database to search out the rest of the story for each of these old time stars in attempts to see what became of them from 1932 until their deaths.
Mary MacLaren
Stars Who Have Vanished, 1932: Dramatic favorite married an army officer and went with him to live in India. Left her husband several years ago, claiming Indian life was unbearable. Returned to Hollywood and at one time had a decorating shop here.
What I Dug Up: Sister of Katherine MacDonald--MacDonald is the previous entry in this series.
Played uncredited bit roles all throughout the 1930's and 40's.
Returning to the occasionally mean-spirited Anthony Slide, MacLaren would self-publish a novel, The Twisted Heart, in 1952 which told the real story of why she left India, it "deals with a woman who fails to realize she has married a homosexual" (238). Recalling a visit to the elderly MacLaren, Slide presents an angry woman who "despised" her sister before going into great detail about how dilapidated her home was.
MacLaren made a few late 1970's and early 80's newspaper appearances which often included the words "Silent Star" and "squalor" in the titles.
One showed the very elderly MacLaren holding a copy of a 1921 issue of Photoplay that she graced the cover of.
She wound up losing her house in 1983 and lived out the last couple of years of her life in the Virgil Convalescent Hospital.
Died in 1985, age 89.
Continue Reading the Where Are They Now, 1932 Series:
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Source:
Slide, Anthony. Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses
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