This doleful, Orientalist starlet is Juanita Hansen, an Iowa-born, Los Angeles-bred star of early Hollywood who worked for L. Frank Baum’s Oz Film Manufacturing Company, the Famous Player-Lasky Corporation, Keystone Studios and eventually Universal Studios. 

Like many early movie actresses, Hansen struggled with the fast-paced entertainment world, and eventually retired from acting in the early 1930s. She dealt with a debilitating cocaine addiction, but eventually went public with her story, creating the Juanita Hansen Foundation and publishing a book called The Conspiracy of Silence (1938) that made a case for treating addiction more as an illness than as a criminal act. 

This particular photo, which is personally inscribed by Hansen, is interesting not just for its subject, but also for its photographer. “Edward Thayer Monroe” is printed in raised lettering in the lower right hand of the print. Monroe was a portrait photographer at White Studios in New York, a studio famous for both performer portraits and for mobile production photography. Monroe was widely regarded as a great photography, with Vanity Fair listing him in the 10 most significant portraitists of 1923.

(credit: American Theatre Architecture Archive, Theatre Historical Society of America)