Lorna Moon
Lorna Moon was a British author and screenwriter from the early days of Hollywood. She is best known as the author of the bestselling novel Dark Star and as one of the earliest and most successful female screenwriters. As a screenwriter, she developed screenplays for notables including Gloria Swanson, Norma Shearer, Lionel Barrymore and Greta Garbo.
Life
Moon was born in Strichen, Aberdeenshire, in 1886, to plasterer Charles Low and Margaret Benzies. She was a socialist and an avowed atheist. In 1907 she met William Hebditch, a commercial traveller from Yorkshire who had stayed at the hotel run by her parents. The two were secretly married in Aberdeen and shortly after the couple left Britain for Alberta in Canada, where Moon gave birth to her first child, William Hebditch. In 1913 she left Hebditch and had a relationship with Walter Moon, with whom she had a child, Mary Leonore Moon. She and Walter travelled to Winnipeg, where she began working as a journalist and where she adopted a pen-name closer to her literary inspiration, Lorna Doone.An anecdote tells how she contacted Cecil B. DeMille and offered a critical appraisal of the screenplays of the day. He challenged her to come to Hollywood and write them herself if she thought she could do better; and by 1921 she did just that, working as a script girl and screenwriter. During her career in Hollywood she had a third child by Cecil B. DeMille's brother William. This child, Richard, grew up unaware of his mother's identity; in later years he discovered his parentage and wrote the memoir My Secret Mother, Lorna Moon.
Lorna Moon contracted tuberculosis and died in a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1930, aged 43. She was cremated and her ashes were returned to Scotland, where they were scattered on Mormond Hill near Strichen.
Career
In 1920, Moon sent director Cecil B. DeMille a critique of his film Male and Female in which she "razzed him wickedly". She went on to train with DeMille at Famous Players–Lasky/Paramount Film Corporation, which later became Paramount Pictures. In the early 1920s, Moon suffered from tuberculosis and wrote short stories and plays from bed before returning to work in 1926.In 1926, Moon worked on screenplays for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer including Upstage, After Midnight, Women Love Diamonds, Mr. Wu and Love. Love was one of MGM's highest-earning films of 1927 and was considered a blockbuster, earning MGM $946,000 domestically and an additional $731,000 internationally.
In 1929, Moon's novel Dark Star was released and reached the bestseller list. The novel was later adapted by Frances Marion into the 1930 film Min and Bill, starring Marie Dressler. Min and Bill is generally thought to have revived Dressler's career.