Kathleen Morrison, better known as Colleen Moore, was born in Port Huron, Michigan, to an irrigation engineer father who provided a comfortable middle-class environment for his family. She received a parochial education and later studied at the prestigious Detroit Conservatory.
Colleen's family relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, and later to Tampa, Florida, where she spent a significant part of her childhood. She described her upbringing as a happy one, with her parents being deeply in love and never arguing with each other, despite having their differences.
As a child, Colleen was fascinated with films and the actresses of the day, such as Marguerite Clark and Mary Pickford, and kept a scrapbook of her idols. She even reserved a blank space for the day she would become a famous star and could put her own picture there.
When a neighbor's piano delivery brought a wooden crate to her doorstep, Colleen convinced the deliverymen to take it to her house, where she set it up as a makeshift stage. This marked the beginning of her career, as she and her friend would perform plays for the other neighborhood children.
By 1917, Colleen was on her way to becoming a star. Her uncle, Walter C. Howey, who was the editor of the Chicago Tribune, had helped D.W. Griffith with his films and had connections in the industry. He asked Griffith to help his niece get a start in Hollywood, and soon she found herself playing in five films that year, with her first starring role as Annie in Little Orphant Annie (1918).
Colleen went on to star in a number of westerns opposite Tom Mix and became synonymous with the "flapper" era, thanks to her iconic role in Flaming Youth (1923). By 1927, she was the top box-office draw in the US, earning an astonishing $12,500 a week. Unlike many of her contemporaries, however, Colleen did not squander her wealth but instead invested it wisely in the stock market.
Colleen successfully transitioned to the era of sound films and continued to act until her final role as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (1934). Although she made a brief appearance in the TV mini-series Hollywood (1980),it was her work on the silver screen that remained her most notable legacy.
After retiring from acting, Colleen wrote two books on investing and even married two stockbrokers. She passed away on January 25, 1988, at the age of 88, due to an undisclosed illness, leaving behind a remarkable legacy in the world of Hollywood.
