On Stage at 16 : Viola Dana; Long Career in Silent Movies

Viola Dana, a raven-haired star of the silent screen whose career became mute as pictures began talking, died over the weekend. She was 90.

Miss Dana, once Broadway’s youngest star at 16, died Friday at the Motion Picture and Television Country Hospital in Woodland Hills, where she had lived the last several years.

Miss Dana, whose late sister Shirley Mason also enjoyed a lengthy film career, first came to films as an unheralded bit player at the old Edison Studios. But after starring on Broadway as the “Poor Little Rich Girl” in 1913, she became one of the best-known ingenues in film at a time when few players received feature credit.

She signed a long-term contract with Metro Pictures before it became part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and was soon seen in “Rosie O’Grady,” “The Parisian Tigress,” “Merton of the Movies,” “Kosher Kitty Kelly,” “Revelation” and more than 50 other films.

High-Paid for Her Time

At one time she was earning a tax-free $1,750 a week, then an uncommonly high salary.

But her voice was not judged suitable for sound pictures, and after a vaudeville tour in the Anita Loos’ skit “The Ink Well” she retired from show business and for many years toured with her golf professional husband, Jimmy Thomson. They divorced near the end of World War II and she became a volunteer aide at the Motion Picture Country House before moving there permanently in 1979.

She was last seen publicly as part of the British Broadcasting Co.’s “Hollywood Pioneers” television series.