Evangeline Russell

Russell was born in Manhattan to actor John Russell Lowell and screenwriter Lillian Case Russell. She had a brother, John L. Russell, who became a cinematographer. She was noted as an expert horsewoman and race car driver.[1]

She pursued a career as an actress in Westerns, often playing the wife of characters played by her father (in scripts written by her mother).[2][3] Her credits include films like The Isle of Sunken Gold, The Big Show, and Lost in a Big City. She was something of a method actor; she recounted trying to harden her feet by walking barefoot for six weeks in preparation for a role in 1927's Hawk of the Hills.[4]

Russell was married at least five times; her husbands included director William P.S. Earle (her final husband), producer J. Stuart Blackton,[5] Roy Wayne, actor Carey Harrison, and rancher Raymond Claymore; she divorced him when she found out he was "a full-blooded Indian".[6] She had two children with Harrison, neither of whom were interested in the family business.[7]

After Blackton (whose fortune was lost in the Great Depression)[8] died in a car accident in 1941,[9] she fell on hard times,[10] taking on work as a babysitter, stuntwoman, extra, and taxi driver to supplement her income and support her children.[7][11]

She died in Los Angeles in 1966; she was survived by Earle and her two children, Frank and Elizabeth, from her marriage to Harrison.[12]

• Hawk of the Hills (1929)
• The Isle of Sunken Gold (1927)
• Hawk of the Hills (1927)
• The Big Show (1926)
• Married? (1926)
• It Might Happen to You (1925) (short)
• Red Love (1925)
• Floodgates (1924)
• Lost in a Big City (1923)