Doris Margaret Kenyon[citation needed] (September 5, 1897 – September 1, 1979) was an American actress of film and television.
Early life
She grew up in Syracuse, New York, where her family had a home at 1805 Harrison Street. Her father, Dr. James B. Kenyon, was a Methodist Episcopal Church minister at University Church. Kenyon studied at Packer College Institute and later at Columbia University. She sang in the choirs of Grace Presbyterian and Bushwick Methodist Churches in Brooklyn, New York. Her brother was a dentist and New York assemblyman Raymond T. Kenyon.[2]
Her voice attracted the attention of Broadway theatrical scouts who enticed her to become a performer on the stage. In 1915, she first appeared as a chorus girl in the Victor Herbert operetta The Princess Pat.[3]
Film career
Twilight (1919)
In 1915, she made her first film, The Rack, with World Film Company of Fort Lee, New Jersey. One of the most remembered[by whom?] films of her early career is Monsieur Beaucaire (1924). In this production, she starred opposite Rudolph Valentino. She and her husband, Milton Sills, starred in The Unguarded Hour for First National Pictures (1925). Laura Wood, a star swimmer and wife of Gaylord Wood, First National Pictures cinematographer, doubled for her swimming scenes because she couldn't swim.
Kenyon's performances as a singer grew out of an evening in New York when a manager of concert artists heard her sing at home for some friends. Afterward, he worked with her to arrange a tour. Singing eventually became an outlet for expressing her feelings after her first husband's death.[4] A soprano, she performed in Detroit as part of the Town Hall Series and in Phoenix as part of the All-Star Artists Series, among others.[5]
Kenyon's concerts featured more than vocal performances. Her "Lyrical Silhouettes" tour in 1933 included "characterizations presented in a half-dozen or more foreign languages and dialects."[6] A variety of costumes supplemented the music in the program's segments.[6]
Radio
Kenyon played Ann Cooper in the soap opera Crossroads on NBC in the 1940s.[7]
Her first husband was the actor Milton Sills. She wed Sills on October 12, 1926.[3] She was widowed in 1930. She had one son with Sills, Kenyon Clarence Sills, born in 1927.[citation needed]
She married New York real estate broker Arthur Hopkins in 1933. The two divorced the following year, citing incompatibility.[citation needed]
Doris Kenyon died on September 1, 1979, at her home in Beverly Hills, California of cardiac arrest.[8]
In popular culture
In 1922, a newborn girl, Doris Kappelhoff, was named after Kenyon. Kappelhoff grew up to be singer and actress Doris Day. Many years later, Day purchased a home in Beverly Hills that was "a few houses away from [Kenyon's], on the very same street."[9]
^ abcdSlide, Anthony (2010). "Doris Kenyon". Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN9780813127088. Retrieved January 14, 2019.
^"You Asked for Them"(PDF). Movie and Radio Guide. 9 (21): 11. March 2, 1940. Archived from the original(PDF) on January 19, 2015. Retrieved 19 January 2015.
