Headstone for actress Anne Cornwall

Anne Cornwall was born in Brooklyn on January 17, 1897, to Alfred H. and Eleanor Thomson Cornwall. Her father’s family name was originally Reordan, but it had been changed at least a couple of generations before Anne was born. She grew up in Catskill, New York, with her little brother Charles, born in 1908. She appeared in some musical comedies on the stage, and in 1917 made her first film, The Knife, in Jacksonville, Florida, for Select Pictures. This was written by ex-Army Lieutenant, war correspondent and college professor Charles Maigne, with whom she began a personal and professional relationship; they were living in Hollywood by 1920 and had married by 1922. Anne appeared in over 40 silent films, among them short comedies for producer Al Christie and Western features starring Hoot Gibson, George O’Brien, and Tom Mix. Maigne wrote and directed some of the pictures in which she appeared. She was Buster Keaton’s lead in College (1927) and of course Men O’ War (1929) with Laurel and Hardy. In 1925 she was one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars. She was in movies for 40 years!

Sadly, six months after Anne appeared in Men o’ War, her husband died at 48, at the Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco, on November 28, 1929. She remarried, to architect Frank Wing Taylor, with whom she had a son, Peter. That marriage ended in divorce, and Anne returned to film work in 1937. She continued doing bit parts in films such as You Can’t Take It with You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, They Won’t Believe Me, and The Buster Keaton Story through 1959. In her last years, she lived with her son in North Hollywood. She died of circulatory failure at 83 on March 2, 1980, at the Beverly Manor Convalescent Hospital in Van Nuys. She was buried at Glen Haven Memorial Park in Sylmar, California. She is currently in an unmarked grave and this fundraiser will give her the marker she deserves.