Madge Bellamy (June 30, 1899 – January 24, 1990) was an American stage and film actress who was a popular leading lady in the 1920s and early 1930s. Her career declined in the sound era, and ended following a romantic scandal in the 1940s.

Biography

Bellamy's only marriage was to bond broker Logan F. Metcalf. They married in Tijuana on January 24, 1928. They separated four days later. Metcalf filed for divorce claiming that while the two were on honeymoon, Bellamy had refused to speak to him because of his fondness for eating ham and eggs which she considered "plebeian". Metcalf was granted a divorce on April 25, 1928.


Later career
The shooting and divorce filing generated publicity for Bellamy, but effectively ended her already fading career. She made her last screen appearance in Northwestern film Northwest Trail in 1945. She returned to the stage in 1946 in the Los Angeles production of Holiday Lady, after which she retired.

By the time Bellamy retired from acting, she had squandered much of her fortune and lost the remaining money during the Depression. In her posthumously published autobiography, A Darling of the Twenties, Bellamy claimed that she lived in "abject poverty" after her retirement. She did, however, have some holdings in real estate and owned a retail shop in which she worked to support herself. In her spare time, she wrote screeplays and novels which were never purchased. In the early 1980s, she sold the retail shop for double the amount she paid for it and lived in relative financial comfort for the rest of her life. Bellamy remained out of public view until the 1980s when film historians and silent film fans who had rediscovered her work began requesting interviews. She also began attending screenings of the low budget horror film White Zombie, which was a moderate success upon its initial release and has since become a cult classic.