Barbara Tennant


Barbara Tennant was an English actress. She appeared in over a hundred silent films between 1912 and 1928.

Early life

Barbara Tennant was born in London, and began performing there. She moved to North America as a young actress and dancer with the Ben Greet company, and lived in Montreal while touring in various theatrical productions.

Film career

Tennant appeared in over a hundred silent films, many of them short productions, between 1912 and 1928. Her first film was Chamber of Forgetfulness, and her last film credit was in A Jim Jam Janitor. Other notable appearances were as Maid Marian in an adaptation of Robin Hood with Alec B. Francis and George Larkin; in Into the Wilderness and The Price of Malice, both directed by Oscar A. C. Lund; as the title character in M'Liss, based on a story by Bret Harte; The Better Wife, starring Clara Kimball Young; in Captain January, starring Baby Peggy; and in The Devil Dancer, featuring Anna May Wong.
Tennant worked at Eclair Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, between 1911 and 1915. By 1919, she was based in Los Angeles, working with producer Jesse Hampton. She was ill for a few years, effectively ending her career momentum, though she made a comeback in 1922, and she appeared in films as late as 1931. "I love it all so," she explained. "I can't leave it."

Films in the news

Tennant was in one of the first films rejected by the British Board of Film Classification in 1913, when she starred as the Virgin Mary in The Crimson Cross, apparently violating rules about the depiction of religious figures.
In 2011, the Russian government presented ten American silent films, previously considered lost, to the Library of Congress. One of those films, Circus Days, starred Tennant and Jackie Coogan.

Partial filmography