Starr, Frances (Grant)

Starr, Frances [Grant] (1881–1973), actress. The soft‐eyed beauty, probably the loveliest of David Belasco's great stars, was born in Oneonta, New York, and spent many years in stock after making her debut in 1901. Spotting her in a minor comedy, Belasco hired her as a replacement in The Music Master, then raised her to stardom as Juanita, who saves her family's land from ruthless speculators, in The Rose of the Rancho (1906). Her most memorable role was the kept woman Laura Murdock in The Easiest Way (1909). Of her performance, one critic wrote, “The suggestion of abject hopelessness at the end is indescribably affecting, and its impressiveness is embodied in the frail personality and remarkably sensitive playing of Miss Frances Starr, whose performance has a tremendous emotional depth hardly to be expected in so delicate an organism.” Subsequent roles for Belasco included Dorothy with a dual personality in The Case of Becky (1911), the unworldly nun Marie‐Odile (1915), the governess Anne Churchill in Little Lady in Blue (1916), the poor but noble Sally in Tiger! Tiger! (1918), and the seamstress Connie Martin in Shore Leave (1922). After Starr left Belasco her career faltered, although she kept busy until she retired in the early 1950s. Her most important role in that period was Mrs. Brown, the heroine's dying mother, in Claudia (1942).