Madge Bellamy (real name Margaret Derden Philpott) was an American actress. She was born in 1899 at Hillsboro, Texas and died in 1990 of heart failure. She got her start in theater working with a stock company in Denver. Put under a personal contract by a Broadway producer, she got her big break when she replaced Helen Hayes in the Broadway play 'DearBrutus'. Her success as a stage actress led to her being signed by Fox Pictures. After appearing in a number of movies in the early 1920's, she is best remembered for her performances in the 1922 ' Lorna Doone' and the 1924 'The Iron Horse'. A strong will contrasted the screen image of innocence and led to disagreements over roles by the late 1920's. She had been cast in a number of movies each year and was in Fox's first dialogue feature, the 1928 'Mother Knows Best'. But her refusal to work in the film 'The Trial of Mary Dugan', which was bought expressly for her, led to her contract with Fox being terminated. It would be another three years until she returned to the
screen in the 1932 cult favorite 'White Zombie' with Bela Lugosi, but her career was not going anywhere as Madge was just one of those old silent stars. For the next few years, she appeared in a small number of low budget films and by 1936 her film career was over. In 1943, she would again appear in the headlines when she shot her lover, millionaire A Stanford Murphy after he jilted her to marry another woman. Research Madge Bellamy
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