A Queen of Silent Movies
In a tiny room cluttered with mementoes of the era of the silent films, a little old lady lives out the autumn of her life. For years the 83-year-old, Lucia Mary Boston, had shut herself up in this room of nostalgia. Few of the neighbours in the small town in Essex knew very much about her. When they saw her, they smiled, they nodded out of politeness and left her to her memories. And they might be forgiven for never knowing that Lucia was once a star. A Queen of the silent films – a siren who made her leading men want to die for her.
In her 83 years, Lucia had lived a rags-to-riches life. As Kitty Lee, she glided across the silent screen, received offers to go to Hollywood and was invited to be understudy to silent movie legend, Mary Pickford. As Lucia Boston, she once had to sell, for £14, her waist-length dark locks of hair which had made her famous.
Let’s take a trip back to her past. The room where she spent most of her time was cluttered with clips of her films and stacked with old scenery and props. She even had a sound-effects machine that her husband had used in one of his bioscopes, an early travelling cinema. She would talk about the days when she was a star, when her husband’s film studio stood on the site of her house, and she remembered back to the harder times and those long dark curls.
The good old days for Lucia were between 1919 and 1920 when Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd were at the height of their fame, and the pianists in the silent cinemas were maestros of drama. It was in this era that Lucia met Mary Pickford.
“It was at a London Hotel that she saw her, and she recalls: “I had the chance to go to Hollywood as her understudy.”
But at that time, Lucia’s husband Albert was struggling to get his film studio established. She proudly told him of her big chance, but sadly he told her that without her, he would be finished, and so Lucia passed on Hollywood, stayed and became the backbone of her husband’s studios in Benfleet. She starred in her husband’s two-reel silent films and also made the scenery and comforted temperamental actresses.
Early films fans saw her in films like East Lynne and Dante’s Inferno, both made at Benfleet, but Hollywood was already making a greater impact on the film world. They had the famous names and the money and Albert Boston’s film studios began to feel the pinch.
“We just couldn’t compete,” said Lucia “Then the council closed the studios because they wanted the land for housing.”
Those golden days of silent stardom were ending for Lucia. “We didn’t bother to start up anywhere else” she recalls, and the couple fell on hard times. It was during those times that she sold her long hair. “I was sorry to see it go,” she said.
Albert came to terms with the end of his film career and switched to building and built twelve houses on the site of the studio. But as Albert began to lose his sight, Lucia put aside her memories and spent the next 25 years running his accounts and looking after him. When Albert died, she remained inside the house for a number of years, grieving over her husband’s death, and when she did eventually go out the traffic scared her.
She moved into the one room that became her life and there, she would have stayed undiscovered, had it not been for a man called Les Cullen, manager of the Cliffs Pavilion in Southend-on-Sea. He was involved with trying to organise a regional film theatre in Southend and someone recalled the old studios in Benfleet.
The search ended when they found Lucia, widow of pioneer film-maker Albert Boston. Many of the priceless archives she had kept locked up in her room went to the British Film Institute but some of the memories of those golden years, she wouldn’t let go, like the two letters she received from Mary Pickford.
Lucia died without a relative in the world. A sad ending for a star whose face was once known to thousands and a sad ending for anyone to die all alone. We were not created to be alone and we were certainly not intended to receive fame and fortune in this life and to hang on to that as if it were the only thing worth hanging on to. But there is more than life in this world – eternal life itself.
Jesus said:
“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?”
(Mark 8:36)
And if there are riches to be sought, our hearts will find them in Jesus only. The Bible says:
“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.”
(2 Corinthians 8:9)