About the Book
Famous Film Folk was published in 1925 by Charles Donald Fox, at the very height of the silent era — Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd ruled comedy, the Barrymores ruled drama, and the fan magazine ruled the newsstand. The book collects two hundred forty-one stars of the screen, each with a studio portrait and a one-page profile in the fan-book style of the day: where they were born, how they were discovered, whom they married, and — always — their height, weight, and the color of their hair and eyes.
Read today, it is a time capsule of a Hollywood on the brink: silent stars at their peak three years before the talkies would remake every career in these pages. Some of its subjects — Ronald Colman (spelled 'Coleman' here), Wallace Beery ('Berry'), Joan Crawford's generation — went on to decades of fame; others vanished with the silents. The book's spellings, studio names and gossip are preserved exactly as printed in 1925.
This digital edition presents the complete keyed text with all two hundred forty-one studio portraits, restored from page scans of the first edition.