The Short Life and Career of Lucille Ricksen

Now that certain GOP politicians are rabid to relax the child labor laws, this might be a suitable time to recount the tale of Lucille Ricksen (Ingeborg Myrtle Elisabeth Ericksen, 1910-1925).

Born to Danish immigrant parents in Chicago, Ricksen was put to work in infancy as a child model. As usually happens in such cases, the family came to rely on her exploitation for support. In 1915 she appeared in her first motion picture as the title character in Selig Polyscope’sThe Millionaire Baby. Around 1918, her father abandoned the family, and her mother depended ever more on Lucille and her older brother Marshall, also a model and child actor, for income.

Ricksen’s screen career began in earnest in 1920 when Samuel Goldwyn signed her to appear in a serial based on Booth Tarkington’sThe Adventures of Edgar Pomeroy, which lasted into 1921. She continued to play age appropriate roles in features into 1922 in such things as The Married Flapper with Marie Prevost and Forsaking All Others with Colleen Moore. Another notable film was Dorothy Davenport’s Human Wreckage (1923), with Bessie Love and James Kirkwood, made in response to the drug-related death of Wallace Reid.

Comedy fans will be especially interested in The Galloping Fish (1924) in which Ricksen appeared with Louise Fazenda, Syd Chaplin, Chester Conklin,Ford Sterling, and Eugene Pallette. That same year she was named a WAMPAS Baby Star, which ironically meant she was beginning to be regarded as an adult. She was now being billed as “The Youngest Leading Lady in Movies”. (Fans of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish know that this was not unusual, unsavory though it may be at times).

By this time, however, Ricksen was already beginning to show signs of the TB that would eventually kill her. But she continued her heavy nonstop workload, appearing in films with the likes of Laura La Plante, T. Roy Barnes, Claire Windsor, Anna Q, Nilsson, George O’Brien, Dorothy Mackaill, et al. By the following year, she collapsed completely, and was bedridden for many months. Towards the end, it is said that her mother literally died of a heart attack while keeping vigil at her bedside. (It must be added that the melodramatic image sounds suspiciously like the kind of fantasy a p.r. flack of the time would concoct.) Whatever the case, two weeks later, Lucille, too expired. The official cause was tuberculosis, certainly exacerbated by exhaustion and malnutrition. She had literally been worked to death.

For more on silent filmplease read  Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.