1. Gene Gauntier performed in 87 films and is credited as the director of The Grandmother.
15 Facts About Gene Gauntier
1. 2.
Gene Gauntier remembered in her 1928 autobiography Blazing the Trail:.
3.
In June 1906, Gene Gauntier was literally thrown into her first screen assignment when she was hired for a daredevil stunt, being filmed as a damsel thrown into a river for Biograph's The Paymaster.
4.
Gene Gauntier then returned to stage acting as the lead female role in George Ade's The County Chairman at Kansas City's Grand Opera House.
5.
In 1907, Gene Gauntier became more involved in the fledgling silent film industry, working for Kalem Studios.
6.
Gene Gauntier became Kalem's star actress, dubbed by the studio as the "Kalem Girl," and became their most productive screenwriter in collaboration with director Sidney Olcott on numerous film projects.
7.
In 1924, after her departure from the film industry, Gene Gauntier reminisced about her time at Kalem as an intensely fruitful period of creative freedom, when her authorial control and influence extended well beyond acting:.
8.
Tom Sawyer was the first of over three hundred screenplays Gene Gauntier either wrote and produced or sold.
9.
Gene Gauntier was among a number of women silent film stars to start their own independent companies during this period.
10.
Gene Gauntier wrote and starred in many of the films her company produced, while Olcott is credited as the main director during this time.
11.
In 1920 at age thirty-five, and after writing forty-two screenplays and performing in eighty-seven films, Gene Gauntier walked away from the business.
12.
Gene Gauntier had sailed to Europe frequently where her sister Marguerite was an opera singer who had trained and worked in Germany, and found herself stranded there when World War I broke out.
13.
Gene Gauntier penned two novels, Cabbages and Harlequins in 1929 and Sporting Lady in 1933.
14.
Gene Gauntier died in 1966 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, aged 81.
15.
Gene Gauntier is buried in Sweden at Haringe Slott close to Marguerite, her sister and Axel Wenner-Gren, her brother-in-Law.