In 1998 I was vacationing alone in London and visited a museum which was centered around motion picture history. Little did I know that I was fated to meet my true love that day. I was walking slowly through the halls, glancing only casually at a collection of pictures from the silent movie era, when the most beautiful smile I had ever seen caught my eye from a small postcard-sized picture on the wall. The picture showed a number of people sitting on the back of an old pickup truck, and the smile belonged to a beautiful teenage silent movie actress named Mary Miles Minter. I sat staring at her image for a long time, allowing myself to drift into a daydream that although separated by time we were somehow meant for one-another, just like Richard Collier (Christopher Reeves) staring at the photo of his true love, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour) in the cult classic time-travel fantasy film "Somewhere in Time" (My favorite movie).

I had never heard of Mary Miles Minter, but determined to find a copy of that picture for myself. Ever since then, I've been collecting postcards and photographs of her, some vintage originals, and others just downloaded and printed from the internet. Today she adorns my living room wall in not one, but several frames, but regretfully I've not yet found a copy of that first image which started it all.

Mary Miles Minter, who's name at birth was actually Juliet Reilly, had a surprisingly short-lived movie career which was cut abruptly short when she was just 19 years old, by one of the first Hollywood scandals, the murder of her director and manager, William Desmond Taylor. Some believe it was Mary's mother, Charlotte Shelby who murdered him, being viciously protective of her daughter who seems to have been in love with Taylor (A love note, and a sexy nightie monogrammed "MMM" were both found in Taylor's apartment after the murder). Her love may have been unrequited however, and the nightie may have been planted there by the killer, for it was also widely reported that Taylor was a homosexual. Nevertheless the murder went unsolved, and Mary's career was never to recover, for she had always been viewed as the quintessential incarnation of girlish purity and innocence, and the Hollywood producers of the day believed the public would never be able to see her in quite the same way again.

I am not attempting any sort of biography of her career (I know far too little about it to do her story justice). To be honest, I've never had much interest in studying these details. This site is primarily just a simple tribute to the mystery and magic of her beauty itself - a photo gallery - my personal shrine to the one of the first, and most captivatingly beautiful stars of the silver screen.

Faithfully yours,

Ted Whitten

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE TO PAGE 2 FOR MORE PHOTOS OF MARY

If you are also a collector a Mary Miles Minter photographs and have any to share, or are interested in selling a photograph or postcard, please e-mail me. Thanks.

Ted Whitten

Click here for links to more Mary Miles Minter pages on the internet

Sites Under Construction But Coming Soon...
"Cheap-Trick.info" - A Tribute to Cheap Trick, with pictures, lyrics, & whatever I can
come up with that would interest my fellow Cheap Trick fans
"Out-Of-Print But Not Out-Of Reach" - A free resource intended to assist you in finding
anything discontinued or out-of-print - books,movies, music, and more
"Unique Antiques" - An antique collector's resource for ideas about unique, rare, or unusual
antiques people collect, information about them, and tools to help find them
"Time-Travel Books And Movies; For The Time-Travel Fanatic Who Can't Get Enough" -
Reviews & Recommendations about tons of great time-travel books and movies

Faithfully Yours / Last updated 7-5-04