American actress Grace Cunard (1893–1967) was one of Universal's most popular serial queens in the 1910s. She was known to her fans as a daring jewel thief, an athletic reporter with a nose for news, and a circus tamer of rather ferocious cats. Typical for the pioneer years, Cunard also wrote some 100 film scripts, directed 11 films, and produced two others. In addition, she edited many of her films, including some of the shorts, serials, and features she developed in collaboration with actor and director Francis Ford. By 1916 they were ranked among the most popular stars in Hollywood.
![Grace Cunard]()
British postcard by Trans-Atlantic Film Co. LTD. Transatlantic-Film Co., Ltd., was the British distributor for Europe for Universal's films in the 1910s.
![Francis Ford, Grace Cunard and Eddie Polo in The Broken Coin]()
Spanish postcard. Photo: Universal. Francis Ford, Grace Cunard, and Eddie Polo in the serial The Broken Coin (Francis Ford, 1915), co-scripted by Cunard. The serial is presumably lost.
Grace Cunard was born Harriet Mildred Jeffries in 1893 in Columbus, Ohio. Harriet was the elder of two daughters of Ohio natives Washington and Lola (née Longshore) Jeffries. Her younger sister, Armina, would also become a film actress, Mina Cunard. Harriet completed her formal education in Columbus, leaving school after the eighth grade, presumably to devote full time to an acting career.
By 1906, at the age of 13, the future film star was already acting in local stage productions such as 'Dora Thorne', 'East Lynne', and then in New York in 'Princess of Patches'. As Grace Cunard, she started acting in films in 1908 for the Biograph Company on East 14th Street in Manhattan. She enjoyed the experience, so she pursued more film roles, which at first consisted of small uncredited parts.
Over the next three years, she was cast in better roles at Biograph and at other studios located in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, including Kalem Studios, Edison, the American subsidiary of Pathé, Republic, and Lubin. In 1912, Grace Cunard moved to California to work in the rapidly expanding film industry there. She was initially hired by "fledgling producer"Thomas H. Ince at Bison Studio.
At Bison, director and actor Francis Ford cast her as the wife of General George Armstrong Custer in the two-reel military drama Custer's Last Fight (Francis Ford, 1912). After her high-profile role in that release, Ince fired her when she refused to leave Ford's company to work elsewhere at Bison. Ford, infuriated by her treatment, left Bison with his crew and players, including Cunard, to work for Universal Pictures.
Jennifer M. Bean at Women Film Pioneers Project: "Cunard’s potent celebrity status in the 1910s cannot be considered outside of her partnership with Francis Ford (born Francis Feeney, the elder brother of Western director John Ford), whom she met in 1912. Cunard’s acting and writing talents, as well as her unerring taste for the popular, merged well with Ford’s directorial experience".
![Grace Cunard]()
American arcade card. Photo: Evans, Los Angeles.
![Francis Ford in The Broken Coin]()
British postcard by The Trans-Atlantic Film Co. (British subsidiary of Universal in Europe). Francis Ford as the male lead in the Universal serial The Broken Coin (Francis Ford, 1915), co-scripted by Grace Cunard, female lead of the serial.
At Universal Grace Cunard continued throughout 1913 to co-star and collaborate with Francis Ford in other two-reel shorts like The Black Masks, From Dawn Till Dark, The White Vaquero, The Belle of Yorktown, From Rail Splitter to President, and others. Their close professional relationship, which had quickly evolved into a personal one as well, led many movie fans to assume the couple was married. The two were increasingly being referred to in trade publications and newspapers as the production team of "Ford-Cunard", with Francis being credited consistently for directing and both of them being praised as "unusually promising screen artists".
By 1914, Grace was being recognised too in the press for her writing. Jennifer M. Bean: "She was also known as 'The Master Pen', a thinly veiled pseudonym that graced announcements and title cards for her first serial story and star vehicle, Lucille Love, The Girl of Mystery (Francis Ford, 1914). Although the exact number of screenplays, stories, and scenarios for which she received credit is unknown, the publicity surrounding her seven-year career at Universal stressed her capacity to 'write everything' in which she appeared."
The She Wolf (Francis Ford, 1913) which was released by Bison Pictures, was one in a series of films in that period that focused attention on Cunard's writing. Promoted as a 'photoplay' about an evil woman, a "wrecker of men's hearts and reputations", She Wolf circulated throughout the country and by May 1914 finally reached Phoenix, Arizona. The Arizona Republican announced, "One of the most interesting and thrilling moving pictures ever shown at the Regale theater, is that scheduled for today. Francis Ford has dramatized Grace Cunard's famous novel, 'She Wolf', and with Miss Cunard appears in the moving picture version of the story."
Cunard and Ford continued their collaboration throughout 1914, releasing an array of two-reel historical dramas, Westerns, comedies, and mysteries, such as The Mad Hermit, The Fall of '64, Won in the First, The Mysterious Leopard Lady, and Washington at Valley Forge. Jennifer M. Bean: "Lauded as making the most “popular” of films, Cunard’s stories tend toward the fantastic, and her female characters tend toward the fantastically unconventional. In 1914 Cunard created 'My Lady Raffles', a jewel thief with a delightfully reckless charm who first appeared in short films like The Mysterious Leopard Lady (1914) and The Mystery of the White Car (1914)."
Turning to a more ambitious project, Cunard and Ford developed for Universal in 1914 and also co-starred in the 15-episode serial Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery. That production's enormous success is reflected in the box-office receipts it generated. Costing only $30,000 or $2,000 per episode to make, the Lucille Love series eventually grossed what was then a staggering return in ticket sales: $1,500,000 ($38,760,000 today). The financial success of Lucille Love inspired the Ford-Cunard partnership to release between their ongoing shorts three more serials for Universal over the next two years: the 22-episode The Broken Coin (Francis Ford, 1915), the 15-episode The Adventures of Peg o' the Ring (Francis Ford, Jacques Jaccard, 1916), and the 16-episode The Purple Mask (Grace Cunard, Francis Ford, 1916-1917).
![Grace Cunard]()
American postcard by Kline Poster Co., Inc., Philadelphia. Picture: Universal. The picture is clearly inspired by the photo portrait on the cards above and below.
![Francis Ford]()
American postcard by Kline Poster Co. Inc., Phila. Image: Universal. Francis Ford.
The intrepid behaviour of Grace Cunard’s zany female characters made her a favourite among audiences at the time, whose numbers reportedly stretched across Australia, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and Japan. Moving Picture Weekly reported in 1916 that the Ford-Cunard team in The Broken Coin was enjoying huge popularity in India.
Cunard's collaboration with Francis Ford continued into 1917, the same year she married for the second time, not to Ford but to the Irish-born actor Joe Moore. Although the media had referred to her as "Miss" since she began working with Ford in 1912, Cunard had married earlier that same year in New York before moving to California.
Wikipedia: "That first marriage appears to have been short-lived and ended, if not legally, for all practical purposes by the time she arrived on the West Coast. Nevertheless, Cunard's collaboration with Ford finally ended after June 1917 with the release of In Treason's Grasp, a five-reeler he directed for Renowned Pictures and in which she co-starred with him."
At the time Cunard started working in films, it was not uncommon for members on set and in post-production to assume a variety of additional duties beyond their primary assignments. Cunard was no exception. While it is now well documented that a significant number of the 'pioneers' in early American filmmaking were women, it was still not common by the 1910s for a young actress with an eighth-grade education to write, perform in, direct, and edit films to the extent Cunard did, often doing all those duties on a single project.
Totals vary in film references regarding the number of silent productions in which she worked. Wikipedia: "Her entry in the 2005 edition of The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema credits her with starring in over 100 silent films, writing screenplays or treatments for 44 of those releases, and directing at least eight of them on her own and more in concert with Ford. Some period newspapers and trade publications credit her with writing between 150 and 200 'photoplays', while one newspaper in 1915 reported that she had authored 400 scenarios, a highly implausible figure given the amount of time Cunard had worked in motion pictures by then. Whatever the true totals, news items and reviews of her completed films testify that her output was prodigious, especially between 1913 and 1918."
![Grace Cunard in The Broken Coin]()
Spanish postcard. Photo: Universal. Grace Cunard in The Broken Coin (Francis Ford, 1915). The man may be Doc Crane, who plays a pawnbroker.
![Francis Ford in The Broken Coin]()
Spanish cromo (collectors card) by Amatller Marca Luna, Series 1a, no. 31. Photo: Universal. Francis Ford as Count Hugo in the serial The Broken Coin (Ford 1915), released in Spain as 'La Moneda Rota'.
Grace Cunard's work as an actor, writer, and director did not cease after her collaboration with Ford ended. She starred in Hell's Crater (W. B. Pearson, 1918), an elaborate five-reel Western, filmed on location in Death Valley National Park. Released by Universal, Hell's Crater was heavily promoted in trade publications. The next year she returned to acting in a serial format, 'supporting'Elmo Lincoln in 18 episodes of Elmo the Mighty (Henry MacRae, J.P. McGowan, 1919).
During 1920 and 1921, she had opportunities working with Marion H. Kohn Productions of San Francisco to once again use the full range of her talents in a series of two-reel Westerns. She wrote, directed, and starred in The Man Hater (1920); directed and starred in Gasoline Buckaroo (1920) and A Daughter of The Law (1921); wrote and starred in The Gun Runners (Louis King, 1921); and co-wrote, directed, and co-starred with Cole Hebert in Her Western Adventure (1921).
After she co-starred in The Last Man on Earth (John G. Blystone, 1924) with Earle Foxe and The Elk's Tooth (Clarence Bricker, 1924) with Lillian Hall, she was cast in fewer and fewer primary roles and was relegated to playing secondary characters for the remainder of the decade. Throughout the 1930s, Cunard continued to act but the complexity of her roles steadily declined until she performed predominantly in minor or uncredited bit parts.
In the 1940s she still secured work at RKO, Republic, and in a few productions at her old 'home studio', Universal. One of her more visible roles among her final appearances in that period is in the serial Gang Busters (Noel M. Smith, Ray Taylor, 1942). She only appears as a landlady in one of its 13 episodes, but her presence in that production was deemed important enough by Universal to include her name in a third-tier bold credit on the serial's theater posters.
Her last screen appearance, one uncredited, is in the role of a woman with a baby in the drama Magnificent Doll (Frank Borzage, 1946) starring Ginger Rogers and David Niven. Shortly after the release of that film, Universal underwent a change in leadership and administrative restructuring, which resulted in the studio discontinuing its program of serials and low-budget features.
Grace Cunard was 53 years old by that time, so after working nearly four decades in motion pictures, she decided to retire permanently from the industry. Cunard was married three times. In 1912 in New York, at the age of 19, she married actor Harry Harvey, who was 20 years her senior. That marriage ended before 1917, although the reasons for its ending are not clearly documented. Her next marriage was to Irish-born actor Joe Moore. They wed at Seal Beach, California, in 1917 but divorced eight years later. Then, in 1925, Cunard married Frederick Lorenzo Tyler, a film stuntman who professionally used the name, Jack Tyler Shannon. They remained married for over 40 years, until her death from cancer in 1967.
At the time of her death, she was residing at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, a neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Her gravesite is also in Los Angeles, at Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in the neighborhood of Chatsworth. The Ford-Cunard 1917 short Unmasked was selected in 2014 by the United States Film Preservation Board for inclusion in the National Film Registry. In 2018, in recognition of the many contributions made by women to the development of the motion-picture industry in the silent era, film library, and distributor Kino Lorber, Inc., in cooperation with the Library of Congress, released a special six-disc box set titled 'Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers'. Included in that set are copies of three episodes from Cunard's serial The Purple Mask (1916-1917 ) as well as a copy of her short The Daughter of 'The Law' (Grace Cunard, 1921).
![David Niven and Ginger Rogers in Magnificent Doll (1946)]()
Spanish postcard. David Niven and Ginger Rogers in Magnificent Doll (Frank Borzage, 1946).
![Grace Cunard]()
British postcard. Photo: Transatlantic-Film Co., Ltd.
Sources: Jennifer M. Bean (Women Film Pioneers Project - temporarily defunct), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
British postcard by Trans-Atlantic Film Co. LTD. Transatlantic-Film Co., Ltd., was the British distributor for Europe for Universal's films in the 1910s.
Spanish postcard. Photo: Universal. Francis Ford, Grace Cunard, and Eddie Polo in the serial The Broken Coin (Francis Ford, 1915), co-scripted by Cunard. The serial is presumably lost.
Acting and writing talents, as well as her unerring taste for the popular
Grace Cunard was born Harriet Mildred Jeffries in 1893 in Columbus, Ohio. Harriet was the elder of two daughters of Ohio natives Washington and Lola (née Longshore) Jeffries. Her younger sister, Armina, would also become a film actress, Mina Cunard. Harriet completed her formal education in Columbus, leaving school after the eighth grade, presumably to devote full time to an acting career.
By 1906, at the age of 13, the future film star was already acting in local stage productions such as 'Dora Thorne', 'East Lynne', and then in New York in 'Princess of Patches'. As Grace Cunard, she started acting in films in 1908 for the Biograph Company on East 14th Street in Manhattan. She enjoyed the experience, so she pursued more film roles, which at first consisted of small uncredited parts.
Over the next three years, she was cast in better roles at Biograph and at other studios located in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, including Kalem Studios, Edison, the American subsidiary of Pathé, Republic, and Lubin. In 1912, Grace Cunard moved to California to work in the rapidly expanding film industry there. She was initially hired by "fledgling producer"Thomas H. Ince at Bison Studio.
At Bison, director and actor Francis Ford cast her as the wife of General George Armstrong Custer in the two-reel military drama Custer's Last Fight (Francis Ford, 1912). After her high-profile role in that release, Ince fired her when she refused to leave Ford's company to work elsewhere at Bison. Ford, infuriated by her treatment, left Bison with his crew and players, including Cunard, to work for Universal Pictures.
Jennifer M. Bean at Women Film Pioneers Project: "Cunard’s potent celebrity status in the 1910s cannot be considered outside of her partnership with Francis Ford (born Francis Feeney, the elder brother of Western director John Ford), whom she met in 1912. Cunard’s acting and writing talents, as well as her unerring taste for the popular, merged well with Ford’s directorial experience".
American arcade card. Photo: Evans, Los Angeles.
British postcard by The Trans-Atlantic Film Co. (British subsidiary of Universal in Europe). Francis Ford as the male lead in the Universal serial The Broken Coin (Francis Ford, 1915), co-scripted by Grace Cunard, female lead of the serial.
The Master Pen
At Universal Grace Cunard continued throughout 1913 to co-star and collaborate with Francis Ford in other two-reel shorts like The Black Masks, From Dawn Till Dark, The White Vaquero, The Belle of Yorktown, From Rail Splitter to President, and others. Their close professional relationship, which had quickly evolved into a personal one as well, led many movie fans to assume the couple was married. The two were increasingly being referred to in trade publications and newspapers as the production team of "Ford-Cunard", with Francis being credited consistently for directing and both of them being praised as "unusually promising screen artists".
By 1914, Grace was being recognised too in the press for her writing. Jennifer M. Bean: "She was also known as 'The Master Pen', a thinly veiled pseudonym that graced announcements and title cards for her first serial story and star vehicle, Lucille Love, The Girl of Mystery (Francis Ford, 1914). Although the exact number of screenplays, stories, and scenarios for which she received credit is unknown, the publicity surrounding her seven-year career at Universal stressed her capacity to 'write everything' in which she appeared."
The She Wolf (Francis Ford, 1913) which was released by Bison Pictures, was one in a series of films in that period that focused attention on Cunard's writing. Promoted as a 'photoplay' about an evil woman, a "wrecker of men's hearts and reputations", She Wolf circulated throughout the country and by May 1914 finally reached Phoenix, Arizona. The Arizona Republican announced, "One of the most interesting and thrilling moving pictures ever shown at the Regale theater, is that scheduled for today. Francis Ford has dramatized Grace Cunard's famous novel, 'She Wolf', and with Miss Cunard appears in the moving picture version of the story."
Cunard and Ford continued their collaboration throughout 1914, releasing an array of two-reel historical dramas, Westerns, comedies, and mysteries, such as The Mad Hermit, The Fall of '64, Won in the First, The Mysterious Leopard Lady, and Washington at Valley Forge. Jennifer M. Bean: "Lauded as making the most “popular” of films, Cunard’s stories tend toward the fantastic, and her female characters tend toward the fantastically unconventional. In 1914 Cunard created 'My Lady Raffles', a jewel thief with a delightfully reckless charm who first appeared in short films like The Mysterious Leopard Lady (1914) and The Mystery of the White Car (1914)."
Turning to a more ambitious project, Cunard and Ford developed for Universal in 1914 and also co-starred in the 15-episode serial Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery. That production's enormous success is reflected in the box-office receipts it generated. Costing only $30,000 or $2,000 per episode to make, the Lucille Love series eventually grossed what was then a staggering return in ticket sales: $1,500,000 ($38,760,000 today). The financial success of Lucille Love inspired the Ford-Cunard partnership to release between their ongoing shorts three more serials for Universal over the next two years: the 22-episode The Broken Coin (Francis Ford, 1915), the 15-episode The Adventures of Peg o' the Ring (Francis Ford, Jacques Jaccard, 1916), and the 16-episode The Purple Mask (Grace Cunard, Francis Ford, 1916-1917).
American postcard by Kline Poster Co., Inc., Philadelphia. Picture: Universal. The picture is clearly inspired by the photo portrait on the cards above and below.
American postcard by Kline Poster Co. Inc., Phila. Image: Universal. Francis Ford.
Hugely popular in Australia, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, India, and Japan
The intrepid behaviour of Grace Cunard’s zany female characters made her a favourite among audiences at the time, whose numbers reportedly stretched across Australia, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and Japan. Moving Picture Weekly reported in 1916 that the Ford-Cunard team in The Broken Coin was enjoying huge popularity in India.
Cunard's collaboration with Francis Ford continued into 1917, the same year she married for the second time, not to Ford but to the Irish-born actor Joe Moore. Although the media had referred to her as "Miss" since she began working with Ford in 1912, Cunard had married earlier that same year in New York before moving to California.
Wikipedia: "That first marriage appears to have been short-lived and ended, if not legally, for all practical purposes by the time she arrived on the West Coast. Nevertheless, Cunard's collaboration with Ford finally ended after June 1917 with the release of In Treason's Grasp, a five-reeler he directed for Renowned Pictures and in which she co-starred with him."
At the time Cunard started working in films, it was not uncommon for members on set and in post-production to assume a variety of additional duties beyond their primary assignments. Cunard was no exception. While it is now well documented that a significant number of the 'pioneers' in early American filmmaking were women, it was still not common by the 1910s for a young actress with an eighth-grade education to write, perform in, direct, and edit films to the extent Cunard did, often doing all those duties on a single project.
Totals vary in film references regarding the number of silent productions in which she worked. Wikipedia: "Her entry in the 2005 edition of The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema credits her with starring in over 100 silent films, writing screenplays or treatments for 44 of those releases, and directing at least eight of them on her own and more in concert with Ford. Some period newspapers and trade publications credit her with writing between 150 and 200 'photoplays', while one newspaper in 1915 reported that she had authored 400 scenarios, a highly implausible figure given the amount of time Cunard had worked in motion pictures by then. Whatever the true totals, news items and reviews of her completed films testify that her output was prodigious, especially between 1913 and 1918."
Spanish postcard. Photo: Universal. Grace Cunard in The Broken Coin (Francis Ford, 1915). The man may be Doc Crane, who plays a pawnbroker.
Spanish cromo (collectors card) by Amatller Marca Luna, Series 1a, no. 31. Photo: Universal. Francis Ford as Count Hugo in the serial The Broken Coin (Ford 1915), released in Spain as 'La Moneda Rota'.
Cast in fewer and fewer primary roles
Grace Cunard's work as an actor, writer, and director did not cease after her collaboration with Ford ended. She starred in Hell's Crater (W. B. Pearson, 1918), an elaborate five-reel Western, filmed on location in Death Valley National Park. Released by Universal, Hell's Crater was heavily promoted in trade publications. The next year she returned to acting in a serial format, 'supporting'Elmo Lincoln in 18 episodes of Elmo the Mighty (Henry MacRae, J.P. McGowan, 1919).
During 1920 and 1921, she had opportunities working with Marion H. Kohn Productions of San Francisco to once again use the full range of her talents in a series of two-reel Westerns. She wrote, directed, and starred in The Man Hater (1920); directed and starred in Gasoline Buckaroo (1920) and A Daughter of The Law (1921); wrote and starred in The Gun Runners (Louis King, 1921); and co-wrote, directed, and co-starred with Cole Hebert in Her Western Adventure (1921).
After she co-starred in The Last Man on Earth (John G. Blystone, 1924) with Earle Foxe and The Elk's Tooth (Clarence Bricker, 1924) with Lillian Hall, she was cast in fewer and fewer primary roles and was relegated to playing secondary characters for the remainder of the decade. Throughout the 1930s, Cunard continued to act but the complexity of her roles steadily declined until she performed predominantly in minor or uncredited bit parts.
In the 1940s she still secured work at RKO, Republic, and in a few productions at her old 'home studio', Universal. One of her more visible roles among her final appearances in that period is in the serial Gang Busters (Noel M. Smith, Ray Taylor, 1942). She only appears as a landlady in one of its 13 episodes, but her presence in that production was deemed important enough by Universal to include her name in a third-tier bold credit on the serial's theater posters.
Her last screen appearance, one uncredited, is in the role of a woman with a baby in the drama Magnificent Doll (Frank Borzage, 1946) starring Ginger Rogers and David Niven. Shortly after the release of that film, Universal underwent a change in leadership and administrative restructuring, which resulted in the studio discontinuing its program of serials and low-budget features.
Grace Cunard was 53 years old by that time, so after working nearly four decades in motion pictures, she decided to retire permanently from the industry. Cunard was married three times. In 1912 in New York, at the age of 19, she married actor Harry Harvey, who was 20 years her senior. That marriage ended before 1917, although the reasons for its ending are not clearly documented. Her next marriage was to Irish-born actor Joe Moore. They wed at Seal Beach, California, in 1917 but divorced eight years later. Then, in 1925, Cunard married Frederick Lorenzo Tyler, a film stuntman who professionally used the name, Jack Tyler Shannon. They remained married for over 40 years, until her death from cancer in 1967.
At the time of her death, she was residing at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, a neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Her gravesite is also in Los Angeles, at Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in the neighborhood of Chatsworth. The Ford-Cunard 1917 short Unmasked was selected in 2014 by the United States Film Preservation Board for inclusion in the National Film Registry. In 2018, in recognition of the many contributions made by women to the development of the motion-picture industry in the silent era, film library, and distributor Kino Lorber, Inc., in cooperation with the Library of Congress, released a special six-disc box set titled 'Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers'. Included in that set are copies of three episodes from Cunard's serial The Purple Mask (1916-1917 ) as well as a copy of her short The Daughter of 'The Law' (Grace Cunard, 1921).
Spanish postcard. David Niven and Ginger Rogers in Magnificent Doll (Frank Borzage, 1946).
British postcard. Photo: Transatlantic-Film Co., Ltd.
Sources: Jennifer M. Bean (Women Film Pioneers Project - temporarily defunct), Wikipedia, and IMDb.