Background
Born as Helen Alice Myres in Denver, Colorado, the daughter of Roy and Mary Myres.
Born as Helen Alice Myres in Denver, Colorado, the daughter of Roy and Mary Myres.
She was usually billed simply as Baby Marie. She soon became — under mysterious circumstances — the child of Leon and Edith Osborn, who called her Marie and added the “e” to the surname, apparently to obscure the adoption. Osborne made her debut in 1914"s Kidnapped in New New York
Signed to a lucrative contract with Balboa Films (and working with director Henry King and writer Clara Beranger), by the age of five she was starring in silent films, including her best remembered movie, Little Mary Sunshine from 1916 (see the film"s IMDb profile), one of her few films which still survive on celluloid.
Some of her other films include Maid of the Wild (1915), Sunshine and Gold (1917), What Baby Forgot (1917), Daddy"s Girl (1918), The Locked Heart (1918), Winning Grandma (1918), The Sawdust Doll (1919), and Daddy Number Two (1919). At the age of eight, she completed her final film as a child star, Mission Gingersnap in 1919.
In all, she was featured or starred in 29 films in a six-year period. Most of her films were produced at Diando Studios, the former Kalem Movie Studio in Glendale, California.
She returned to motion pictures 15 years later – at the request of director Henry King – to appear in his 1934 movie Carolina, starring Janet Gaynor and Lionel Barrymore.
This movie also featured future child star Shirley Temple in a minor role. Over the next 16 years, Osborne worked as a film extra, additionally serving as a stand-in for actresses such as Ginger Rogers, Deanna Durbin, and Betty Hutton. After appearing in more than a dozen films, she made her last on-screen appearance in Bunco Squad (1950), starring Robert Sterling and Joan Dixon.
In the 1950s she started a new career as a costumer for Western Costume, a clothing supplier for the motion picture industry.
In 1963, Osborne worked as a special costumer for Elizabeth Taylor in the big-budget film, Cleopatra. Osborne retired in 1977, and moved to San Clemente, California.
Marie Osborne Yeats died on November 11, 2010 in San Clemente, California, six days after her 99th birthday. She was interred at Mission San Luis Rey Cemetery.