Obituaries

One of the last, if not THE last, of the actors of the silent film era who performed as an adult then, Barbara Kent, either 103 or 104, has died.

She is best remembered by yours truly as being the young girl who falls in love with John Gilbert in the 1926 classic, Flesh and the Devil, but of course Gilbert's character was stuck on the temptress character played by Greta Garbo.

A brunette, baby-faced beauty, both shapely and petite — most sources say she was under five feet tall — Ms. Kent made her film debut in “Prowlers of the Night,” a 1926 western in which she was the only woman in the cast. She followed that with a featured role in “Flesh and the Devil,” playing a lovelorn young woman with a crush on a man (played by John Gilbert) who is enthralled by the wily vamp played by Garbo.

Ms. Kent was an inexperienced performer, but Universal Studios had offered her a contract and provided rudimentary acting lessons after she won the 1925 Miss Hollywood beauty pageant.

“I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life,” she told Michael G. Ankerich in an interview for “The Sound of Silence,” his 1998 book about Hollywood in the transition from silent to sound pictures. But, she added, “being an actress was not it.”