She toured the United States as a concert pianist until her final performance in Charleston, South Carolina, a year later. By April 1903, Weber was performing as a soprano singer and pianist. In June 1900, Weber was almost 21 and living with her parents and two sisters at 1717 Fremont Street, Allegheny, Pennsylvania, where she was a music student. Weber left home and lived in poverty while working as a street-corner evangelist and social activist for two years with the evangelical Church Army Workers, an organization similar to the Salvation Army, preaching and singing hymns on street corners and singing and playing the organ in rescue missions in red-light districts in Pittsburgh and New York, until the Church Army Workers disbanded in 1900. As a girl, music was her passion, and her most treasured possession was a baby grand piano. Weber was considered a child prodigy and an excellent pianist. The Webers were a devout middle class Christian family of Pennsylvania German ancestry. She was the younger sister of Elizabeth Snaman Weber Jay and older sister of Ethel Weber Howland, who later appeared in two of Weber's films in 1916 and married assistant director Louis A. For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Weber was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 8, 1960.įlorence Lois Weber was born on June 13, 1879, in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, the second of three children of Mary Matilda Snaman and George Weber, an upholster and decorator who had spent several years in missionary street work. Weber is credited with discovering, mentoring, or making stars of several women actors, including Mary MacLaren, Mildred Harris, Claire Windsor, Esther Ralston, Billie Dove, Ella Hall, Cleo Ridgely, and Anita Stewart, and with discovering and inspiring screenwriter Frances Marion. Īmong Weber's notable films are: the controversial Hypocrites, which featured the first non- pornography full-frontal female nude scene, in 19 film Where Are My Children?, which discussed abortion and birth control and was added to the National Film Registry in 1993 her adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes novel for the very first Tarzan of the Apes film, in 1918 The Blot (1921) is also generally considered one of her finest works. By 1920, Weber was considered the "premier woman director of the screen and author and producer of the biggest money making features in the history of the film business". At her zenith, "few men, before or since, have retained such absolute control over the films they have directed-and certainly no women directors have achieved the all-embracing, powerful status once held by Lois Weber". ĭuring the war years, Weber "achieved tremendous success by combining a canny commercial sense with a rare vision of cinema as a moral tool". She was also the first American woman to direct a full-length feature film when she and Smalley directed The Merchant of Venice in 1914, and in 1917 the first American woman director to own her own film studio. In collaboration with her first husband, Phillips Smalley, in 1913 Weber was "one of the first directors to experiment with sound", making the first sound films in the United States. Weber has been credited with pioneering the use of the split screen technique to show simultaneous action in her 1913 film Suspense. Weber was "one of the first directors to come to the attention of the censors in Hollywood's early years".
She has been credited by IMDb with directing 135 films, writing 114, and acting in 100.
Weber produced a body of work which has been compared to Griffith's in both quantity and quality and brought to the screen her concerns for humanity and social justice in an estimated 200 to 400 films, of which as few as twenty have been preserved. Griffith, Weber was the American cinema's first genuine auteur, a filmmaker involved in all aspects of production and one who utilized the motion picture to put across her own ideas and philosophies". Film historian Anthony Slide has also asserted, "Along with D. She is identified in some historical references as among "the most important and prolific film directors in the era of silent films". Florence Lois Weber (J– November 13, 1939) was an American silent film actress, screenwriter, producer and director.