Bess Flowers - "Queen of the Hollywood Extras"

Bess Flowers is a familiar face to everybody who has seen many movies from the 1930s right into the 1960s. Ms. Flowers was always cast as an "extra", a movie term for any actor/actress who appears in a non-speaking role, usually in a crowd scene, or as a party guest, or nightclub patron, etc. If she ever spoke in any movie, I can't remember, though she may have done so in a few.

Ms. Flowers began her career in the 1920s, and appeared in several hundred movies over the next five decades. She also appeared in a handful of tv shows.

When I wrote her in the early 1980s, she was a resident of the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California. I was able to find a nice portrait of her, which was actually quite rare, considering she was only an "extra". She inscribed and returned it to me quickly, but in her haste, she misspelled the word "remembering", as you can see here.