14. The Actress Who Went Up in Flames
The silent film era’s The Warrens of Virginia was a 1924 romantic drama, with a plot that revolved around a love story in which a man leaves his Southern sweetheart to fight for the Union in the Civil War. No known prints survive today, which makes it one of the many lost movies from those days. The film is best known now for the death of its star, Martha Mansfield (1899 – 1923) in a freak accident that burned her alive on set.
Mansfield was a New Yorker who had decided at an early age that she would become an actress. When she was fourteen years old, she got a role in a Broadway play and took side gigs as a model for artists and a dancer in musicals. In 1917, she was signed up by one of the forerunners of what would become Warner Bros. Studios, and performed in three short movies. A year later, she appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies – a popular series of theatrical revue productions that ran on Broadway from 1907 to 1934, and combined music, dance, and sketches.
