Estelle Taylor

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Estelle Taylor (May 20, 1894—April 15, 1958) was an American Hollywood actress whose career was most prominent during the silent film era of the 1920s.

Born Ida Estelle Taylor in Wilmington, Delaware, the daughter of Harry D Taylor and Ida LaBertha (Barrett) Taylor, Estelle married three times during her lifetime. Her first husband was banker Kenneth Malcom Peacock, her second was William Harrison "Jack" Dempsey (Jack Dempsey the world heavyweight boxing champion), and theatrical producer Paul Smith.

After relocating to Hollywood, she began taking bit parts in films.

One of Taylor's earliest successes was in 1920 in Fox's While New York Sleeps with Marc McDermott. She and McDermott play three sets of characters in different time periods. This film was lost for decades but has been recently discovered and screened at a film festival in Los Angeles. Taylor is possibly best recalled for her roles in the 1922 drama Monte Cristo opposite John Gilbert, the enormously successful 1923 Cecil B. DeMille directed The Ten Commandments as Miriam, the sister of Moses; as Lucrezia Borgia in the 1926 Warner Bros.' first feature-length film with synchronized Vitaphone sound effects and musical soundtrack Don Juan opposite John Barrymore, Mary Astor and Warner Oland, 1927's New York, opposite Ricardo Cortez and Lois Wilson, 1931's Street Scene with Sylvia Sidney and both the Academy Award winning Cimarron and the Clara Bow talkie, Call Her Savage in 1932.

Taylor married heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Dempsey, in 1925. She was supposed to have co-starred in a movie with actor Rudolph Valentino which would have brought her more widespread fame but he died just before production was to begin. In 1928 she and husband Dempsey starred in a Broadway play titled The Big Fight, loosely based around Dempsey's boxing popularity, which ran for 31 performances at the Majestic Theatre.