10 Facts About Elsie Janis

Elsie Janis performed at the grand opening of the Brown Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky on October 5,1925.

Elsie Janis enjoyed a career as a Hollywood actress, screenwriter, production manager and composer.

Elsie Janis was co-credited alongside Gene Markey for writing the original story for Close Harmony and as composer and production manager for Paramount on Parade.

Elsie Janis wrote about her wartime experiences in The Big Show: My Six Months with the American Expeditionary Forces, and recreated these in Behind the Lines, a 1926 Vitaphone musical short.

In 1934, Elsie Janis became the first female announcer on the NBC radio network.

Elsie Janis expressed no desire to have children of her own, saying she would never meet the standards her mother set, and said that her young husband could be her child.

Elsie Janis was foster mother to a 14-year-old Italian war veteran and orphan, Michael Cardi, in 1919.

In 1932, Elsie Janis married Gilbert Wilson, who was 16 years her junior, which caused some scandal.

The couple lived in the Phillipse Manor section of Sleepy Hollow, New York, formerly named North Tarrytown, until Elsie Janis moved to the Los Angeles area of California where she lived until her death.

Elsie Janis died in 1956 at her home in Beverly Hills, California, aged 66, and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.