Helen Jerome Eddy

Helen Jerome Eddy (February 25, 1897 – January 27, 1990) was a movie actress from New York City. She was noted as a character actress who played genteel heroines in films such as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917).

Eddy was born in New York City on February 25, 1897, and was raised in Los Angeles. As a youth, she acted in productions put on by the Pasadena Playhouse. She became interested in films through the studio of Siegmund Lubin, which was based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In her youth, they opened a backlot in her Los Angeles neighborhood.

Lubin's studio rejected a scenario that Eddy wrote at age 17, "but decided to capitalize on her face", using her in vamp roles in "lurid melodramas".

Eddy's first movie was The Discontented Man (1915). Soon after, she left Lubin and joined Paramount Pictures. At this time, she began to play the roles for which she is best remembered. Other films in which the actress participated include The March Hare (1921), The Dark Angel, Camille, Quality Street, The Divine Lady (1929) and the first Our Gang talkie Small Talk (1929).

She made Girls Demand Excitement in 1931 and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, her final film, in 1947.

Eddy thrived on playing varied characters and said "Italian women, French, Turkish, girls of the Bowery, kitchenmaids — they're all in the day's work".

Dissatisfaction with her salary led Eddy to retire from her film career.

After she retired from films, Eddy worked in real estate in Pasadena. She acted in some local productions, including playing religious characters in plays at the Pilgrimage Theater in Hollywood Hills.

Eddy died of heart failure on January 27, 1990, at the Episcopal Home in Alhambra, California at age 92.