Helen Jerome Eddy; Silent Screen Actress Played High-Class Heroines

Helen Jerome Eddy, a silent screen actress who ventured briefly into talkies before retiring 50 years ago, died Saturday at the Episcopal Home in Alhambra.

Miss Eddy, whose best-known work came in the early part of this century, was 92.

She was raised in Los Angeles and attracted to films by the old Philadelphia-based studios of Siegmund Lubin, which had just opened a Los Angeles lot on Pasadena Avenue in her neighborhood.

There she made her first film in 1915, “The Red Virgin.” She moved from there to Paramount Studios, said longtime friend Gerald Hamm, and began to portray the high-class heroines for which she became known.

Typical of that work was “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (1916), “The March Hare” (1921), “The Dark Angel” (1925), “Camille” (1927) and “The Divine Lady” (1927).

Her sound pictures included “The Bitter Tea of General Yen,” “The Garden of Allah” and her last, “Strike Up the Band” in 1940, in which she played Mrs. Brewster, the mother of one of Mickey Rooney’s friends.

Hamm said she became dissatisfied with her salary and retired from films to pursue a successful real estate career in Pasadena. She did appear in several local stage productions and was a regular at the old Pilgrimage Theater in the Hollywood Hills where she portrayed religious figures.

Miss Eddy never married and leaves no known survivors.