Lois M. Young; Star in Silent’s ‘Stella Dallas’

Lois Moran Young, a dancer at the Paris Opera at age 13 and a film star two years later as the daughter in the silent version of “Stella Dallas,” died Friday at a nursing home in Sedona, Ariz. She was 81 and had retired to Arizona many years ago.

Said to have been F. Scott Fitzgerald’s inspiration for Rosemary in “Tender Is the Night,” Mrs. Young, who acted as Lois Moran, was last before the cameras in 1954 when she played May Herrick, wife of Capt. John Herrick (Preston Foster) in the TV series “Waterfront,” based on the adventures of a tugboat captain in San Pedro.

Mrs. Young, born in Pittsburgh, was given dancing lessons at an early age, studied in France and danced with the Paris Opera. She was photographed by Man Ray and made two films in Europe when Samuel Goldwyn discovered her.

Originally, he wanted her for the lead in “Romeo and Juliet,” but she became Laurel in his 1925 “Stella Dallas” with Ronald Colman. She appeared in more than two dozen movies, among them “Reckless Lady,” “The Road to Mandalay,” “Mammy” and “The Men in Her Life.”

She then studied singing and made her Broadway debut in “This Is New York” before starring in George S. Kaufman-Morrie Ryskind long-running satiric hit “Of Thee I Sing.”

While in Hollywood, she had become friendly with Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, and was said to have been his model for Rosemary Hoyt, the film starlet in Fitzgerald’s semi-autobiographical novel of disillusioned Americans living in the decadence of post-World War I Europe.

In 1935 she married Clarence M. Young, a vice president of Pan American World Airways who was a year younger than her mother. She told Richard Lamparski in a 1985 interview for his “Whatever Became of . . . ?” series of books on former stars that they were “wonderfully happy” until his death in 1972.

In the 1950s she taught drama and dance at Stanford University and then co-starred in “Waterfront,” retiring after that.

She is survived by a son, Timothy.