Biography

Flora Finch

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Flora Finch was born in London, England, on June 17, 1867. After spending time on the legitimate stage, she began to make films, and was one of the early comedy stars of the silent-film era. Her first film was Mrs. Jones Entertains (1909). After making nine more films she began appearing with rotund comic John Bunny, and together they would make more than 250 shorts over the next five years, becoming the cinema's first popular comedy team. Among their more popular titles were The New Stenographer (1911), The Subduing of Mrs. Nag (1911) and A Cure for Pokeritis (1912). She made other films on her own in addition to those she made with Bunny, and after he died in 1915 she began her own series of comedy shorts, although not meeting with the kind of success she had with Bunny. By the time the sound era began she was relegated to minor supporting roles and bit parts, although she did have a fairly decent role in The Scarlet Letter (1934) with Colleen Moore, as one of the self-righteous women in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of life in colonial America. Finch retired from acting after appearing in The Women (1939), ending a long and illustrious career. On January 4, 1940, she died of rheumatic fever, brought on by a streptococcus infection, in Los Angeles, California. She was 70 years old.
- IMDb mini biography by: Denny Jackson

Extrodinarily tall and skinny for a woman of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, accentuated by an elongated face and a long "swan" neck. Her unusual physique was often juxtaposed with shorter, fatter co-stars like John Bunny.

Made 260 shorts with John Bunny between 1910 and 1915, which were known as 'Bunnygraphs', 'Bunnyfinches', and 'Bunnyfinchgraphs.'
Although she and John Bunny made more than 250 comedy shorts together for Vitagraph, studio chief Albert E. Smith recalled that "they cordially hated each other".
She played the vaudeville stage in New York from at least 1901. Most of her pictures were made in New York and New Jersey; she first came to California in 1926.
Buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California - Section 2, #416
In 1917, she became one of the first stars to form an eponymous production company -- The Flora Finch Film Corporation. She placed advertisements in film industry trade publications announcing her new company with this screaming banner: "FLORA FINCH!! IN ALL HER SCRAWNY, SKINNY MAJESTY!" The ad included a photograph of her head pasted onto an artist's rendering of her body, which included pipe-cleaner-like arms and legs, and a neck that was twice as long as her real neck. (According to the ad copy, the offices for her company were located at 729 7th Avenue, New York.).