Well, at last The Telegraph comes through. Some excerpts, in case you have to register to read their site:
Joan Morgan, who was at least aged 99 when she died last Thursday, was the last British screen star from before the First World War, and later a scriptwriter, playwright and novelist. The daughter of the film director Sidney Morgan, she had the rosebud lips, luminous wide eyes and alabaster skin which made her perfect for the silent screen. Her first film was The Cup Final Mystery (1913). During the First World War she went to New York where she made several pictures, including The Reapers, then returned to appear in The World’s Desire and The Perils of Divorce (1915), Drink (1916) and Two Little Wooden Shoes (1919); none of these have survived.
Despite such an impressive start, Joan Morgan always felt that she had been cheated of great fame and fortune. After she appeared with the American star Bryant Washburn in The Road to London, the story of an American who elopes with an heiress, Washburn suggested that she return with him to Hollywood; he was confident that she could be a serious rival to Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Blanche Sweet and Mary Pickford. But Joan had a crush on Bryant. When he phoned her father, offering her a five-year contract which would include one picture with Charlie Chaplin and another with Douglas Fairbanks, Morgan played the heavy parent and turned him down without consulting either his daughter or her mother.
Joan Morgan claimed to have been born in London on February 2 1905, though there is good reason to suspect the year was 1899. She went for a time to the Elleker College for the Children of Gentlefolk, and started to appear in her father’s films at the Glasshouse studio on Shoreham beach, Sussex. “I remember Stanley Lupino visiting me with his young and rather timid daughter Ida, asking for my autograph. Ivor Novello became a good friend; he wrote a song for me called I Wonder Will My Dolly Miss Me?” Noel Coward demanded an introduction, though she recalled that he was very aloof and jealous. “There was no meat and bones to those silly flapper types. I thought that if my career was just simply going to consist of little bits of fluff then I’d better quit while ahead.” She did, however, make one talkie, Her Reputation, in 1932; it did not re-establish her name before the cameras.
But Joan Morgan claimed to have no regrets since she had taken up writing film scripts as well as producing 15 novels under the pseudonym of Joan Wentworth Wood in the 1930s; her only wish was that more of her work had been transferred to the screen.
