Betzwood Actors

Louise Huff was born in Columbus, Georgia, on the 14th of November 1895. She was a descendant of President James K. Polk.

Miss Huff began her career at the age of fifteen, appearing in the Broadway version of Ben Hur, then touring in a road company presenting the play.  She also toured in other plays before joining the Lubin Manufacturing Company in 1913. Her sister, Justina, came to Lubin at the same time and both of the Huff sisters were sent to work at Lubin’s Betzwood studio.

Only five feet tall, buoyant in personality, with a delicate face, violet eyes and golden blond ringlets, Louise Huff was nicknamed “the Kate Greenaway Girl of the Screen,” a reference to the children’s book illustrations of the popular English artist, Kate Greenaway (1846-1901). Louise was most often cast in ingénue parts, while her somewhat plain and more serious sister Justina took on more serious roles.

Louise was assigned to the stock company of actor, Edgar Jones, who directed his own films as well as appearing in them. Opposite Jones, Louise played a variety of parts in one and two-reel Lubin films ranging from westerns to Civil War dramas to domestic melodramas.  Three of the films that Jones and Huff made together at Betzwood survive today: The Vagaries of Fate, The Country Girl, and Where the Road Divided.

Despite a twenty-one year age difference, a romance blossomed between the co-stars and quickly led to marriage.  In January 1914, Edgar Jones married Louise Huff at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in the hamlet of Oaks near the studio, a location where they had made their first film together. The wedding party included the Betzwood cowboys who shocked the normally quiet rural community by celebrating the nuptials with hooting and hollering and firing live ammunition into the air. The marriage would last only five years, with Miss Huff later telling a reporter that it was a “youthful mistake.”

In 1915, Louise Huff and Edgar Jones, and their baby daughter, Mary Louise, left Lubin’s employ to see if they could advance their careers elsewhere. While Edgar Jones made only a handful of westerns in the next several years, Miss Huff obtained a number of leading roles in feature films for Famous Players, Fox Films, Triumph Films, Oliver Morosco, and Universal.

Following her divorce from Edgar Jones in 1919, Louise Huff married Edwin A. Stillman, with whom she would have two more children. With her movie career beginning to wane, she decided to retire from the screen in 1922. One newspaper reported that she “had tried the limelight and apparently prefers the soft glow of hearth fires.” She did, however, make an occasional appearance on stage. Louise Huff died in New York on the 2nd of August 1973 at the age of seventy-seven.