Actors -  Patricia Palmer

A stage actress, she claimed, from the age of two, brunette Margaret Gibson played ingénue roles for Vitagraph in the mid-1910s, often opposite William Clifford. She was also Charles Ray's leading lady in the extant The Coward (1915) and later did two Westerns opposite the era's leading screen cowboy, William S. Hart: The Money Corral (1919) and Sand (1920). But Gibson's life away from the studios always seemed rather more dramatic than any of her film roles, a life in the fast lane that culminated with her being arrested several times for "vagrancy" (read: prostitution). The resulting headlines demanded a change of moniker and she was Patricia Palmer for the remainder of her professional career, which was mainly spent in Poverty Row productions and ended at the advent of sound. Eerily, Gibson/Palmer "confessed" on her deathbed to having murdered director William Desmond Taylor on February 1, 1922. The claim, however, has been dismissed by all leading authorities, leaving one of Hollywood's greatest mysteries unsolved. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi

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