One of the last stars of the silent movie era It is in the nature of cinema that an actor who made her last film appearance more than seven decades ago, and who retreated from public view in the late 1940s, refusing photographs and interviews ever since, can still be appreciated on screen as young, as lovely and as fresh as ever. Barbara Kent, who has died aged 103, was one of the last surviving stars of the silent era. She appeared in the last great silent American film, Lonesome (1928), Paul Fejos's masterpiece of urban poetry. Kent played Mary, a switchboard operator, who meets Jim (Glenn Tryon), a factory worker, in Coney Island. They spend the day together, fall in love, and then lose each other in the crowd. The simple tale of "little people" is raised by the sincerity of the performances and by the director's expressive use of location, camera movement and montage. Unfortunately, Universal Studios, to whom Kent was under contract, insisted on adding three stilted, incongruous talkie sequences to the film to demonstrate the newfangled sound technique. (There was already a music score and sound effects.) Despite allowances made for the crude recording system, Kent's voice came over as rather tinny and there were fears that she, like other silent screen stars, might fall by the wayside. But with voice lessons, her career survived and she reached the peak of her popularity as Harold Lloyd's girlfriend in his first two talkies, Welcome Danger (1929) and Feet First (1930). She was born Barbara Cloutman in Alberta, Canada, and moved to California with her family in her teens. After winning the title of Miss Hollywood 1925, she was immediately offered a contract with Universal, although she had never acted before. Her first role was as the only woman in Prowlers of the Night (1926), a western directed by Ernst Laemmle, the nephew of Carl Laemmle, the owner of Universal. In the same year, Kent was given fourth billing in Clarence Brown's Flesh and the Devil, in which she played a 15-year-old girl, hopelessly in love with John Gilbert, who has eyes only for vamp Greta Garbo. In No Man's Law (1927), which starred Rex the Wonder Horse and Oliver Hardy in one of his rare non-comic roles as a villain, Kent is very cute, first seen in a pair of oversized pyjamas and then swimming in the "nude", a scene that caused controversy despite the fact that she was wearing a flesh-coloured bathing suit. She is the sweet inamorata of a football hero (Richard Barthelmess) in The Drop Kick (1927) and, in Modern Mothers (1928), of a playwright (Douglas Fairbanks Jr), who returns to her after a fling with her mother. Lonesome gave Kent a further boost, and she appeared in William Wyler's The Shakedown (1929), a touching drama once thought lost and only recently rediscovered and restored, about a girl (Kent), a prize fighter and an orphan boy. Kent entered the sound era in Welcome Danger. When they first meet, Kent, with her hair tucked back, in overalls trying to fix her broken-down car, is mistaken by Lloyd for a boy. Playing along, she later reveals her femininity, and they fall in love. Kent again showed her mischievous streak in Feet First, in which she is a secretary whom Lloyd, as a lowly clerk, mistakes for his boss's daughter. In Leo McCarey's Indiscreet (1931), which the director himself described as lousy, Kent was effective as Gloria Swanson's sister. She was an adequate Amelia Sedley in an inadequate, updated adaptation of Vanity Fair in 1932 and exuded kindness as Rose Maylie in the first talkie version of Oliver Twist, in 1933. In 1932 she married Harry Edington, an agent who was to become, for a short period, an executive producer at RKO. When she saw herself slipping down the credits, she retired in 1935, aged 28. After Edington died in 1949, Kent married Jack Monroe, an engineer. Monroe died in 1998. Towards the end of her life, Kent lived in a retirement home in Sun Valley, Idaho, where most of her friends and neighbours were unaware that she was once a Hollywood star. • Barbara Kent (Barbara Cloutman), actor, born 16 December 1907; died 13 October 2011 Ronald Bergan The Guardian 21 October 2011

I felt I must share with you a visual representation of my previously mentioned ‘at home’ persona. I have over the years fashioned a kind of modern day ‘house coat’ if you like of my most comfortable and practical clothing. Naturally there is no time and certainly no inclination to change footwear or clothing depending on the various indoor and outdoor tasks during a day, therefore I choose the lowest common denominator; dress for the dirtiest activity you will be doing and then you won’t need to change. I therefore have trackkie bottoms which can’t be worn in public without a Staffordshire bull terrier in full harness with horse brasses but which can be worn around the home in great comfort and are particularly suitable when returning to bed for a post breakfast nap. The apron remains on at all times, no longer do I need worry about spilling food down myself or any other substance, in fact, in most snack situations the apron can be used in place of a plate to catch falling remnants, requiring simply a ‘held-up-corners-hobble’ to the bin after eating. Giant cardigan over cashmere jumper over pyjama top renders all drafts ineffectual. The best excuse for not bothering to make up the face is that you are giving your skin a day off to breathe. The real truth is you cannot face the daily ritual of covering over the blemishes that are so familiar to you now that you can point to them without looking in the mirror. It would be most helpful to have a Mrs Doubtfire-type mask that can sit ready made-up on a stand in case one needs to answer the door. Perhaps a cardboard photo of my face on a stick could be held up on emergency trips to the corner shop. I actually tend to save up all the reasons that I need to go out into the real world for one day where I prepare my face like a geisha. I think people down my road who have seen rare glimpses of the ‘home’ version of me think that there are two women living at my house and one is looking after her older, degenerate, malnourished, and pasty faced, drug drained sister with dreadful dress sense.