Petite, sultry leading lady of the 1920s and '30s who was born and
schooled in Tampa, Florida, until the age of ten when she lost her
mother. She moved to New York with her dad and started modeling while
still in her teens. Her original intention was to go into the teaching
profession. Instead, Evelyn became enamored with acting during a school
visit to the Popular Plays and Players Studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, a
production cooperative for distributors World Film, Pathe and Metro.
Before long, she obtained a job as an extra for $3 a week using her
birth name Betty Riggs. Between 1914 and 1920, she appeared in
featured film roles with stars like
Olga Petrova and
John Barrymore (who hand-picked
her as his leading lady for Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1917)), then took a sabbatical
for health reasons and went to England.
By making the acquaintance of American playwright Oliver Cromwell she
was able to land a good role in the
George Bernard Shaw comedy 'The
Ruined Lady' on the London stage. This, in turn, led to her being cast
as leading lady in several British films. In 1922, she even went to
Spain as star of
Spanisches Blut (1922),
distributed in America by Paramount. Upon her return to the United
States in 1924, she was briefly under contract to Fox, then joined
Associated Authors, and, finally, Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky
(1926-30). At the height of her career in silent films, the
dark-haired, aquiline Evelyn became a matinee idol with performances as
exotic temptresses and vamps, particularly in films by Austrian
director Josef von Sternberg. She
was notable as the gangster's moll 'Feathers' in
Unterwelt (1927) (the proverbial
tough broad with the heart of gold) and as a
self-sacrificing Russian girl in love with an exiled Czarist general
(Emil Jannings)
in Sein letzter Befehl (1928). She
gave another interesting performance as a
blackmailer in Paramount's first all-talking picture
Interference (1928)
While Evelyn's voice proved no detriment to her success in talking
pictures, the declining quality of her films certainly did. Her Alaskan epic
The Silver Horde (1930) in
which she portrayed another disreputable character named Cherry Malotte
was described in critical review as 'dull and trivial' (New York
Times, October 25). Her performances as gang molls in
Framed (1930) and
The World Gone Mad (1933), as well as
her unlikely mission worker in
Madonna of the Streets (1930)
engendered lukewarm write-ups like 'satisfactory' or 'competent'. This
did nothing to elevate Evelyn's post-Paramount career. By the end of
the decade she had moved down the cast list from second leads to
supporting roles, finally appearing in westerns and 'quota quickies'
for poverty row studios, such as Monogram and PRC. One example of the 'cheap and
cheerful' category in which she seemed to enjoy herself was the Columbia serial
Holt of the Secret Service (1941),
playing Kay Drew, partner of tough agent
Jack Holt. She was also memorable in one
of her last roles as a one-armed satanist in the eerie
Val Lewton horror flick about devil-worshipers
in Greenwich Village,
The Seventh Victim (1943).
After making her last film in 1950, Evelyn found work as an actor's
agent with the Thelma White Agency in Hollywood. After the death of her
third husband, Harry Fox (who gave the Foxtrot its name) in 1959,
Evelyn made a final screen appearance as a guest star on
Wagon Train (1957). She left the
limelight for good in 1960 and lived her remaining years in retirement
in Westwood Village, California. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6548 Hollywood Boulevard.
