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  Anna Quentine NILSSON

 

 Anna Quirentia Nilsson nacque il 30 marzo del 1888 a Ystad nell'estremo sud della Svezia e fu un'attrice statunitense che girò un impressionante numero di film.

 Il suo nome Quirentia deriva dalla sua data di nascita: il 30 marzo che è il giorno di san Quirino.

 Nel 1905 emigrò negli USA dove lavorò come modella prima di diventare una grande star del cinema muto e dei primi tempi di quello sonoro.

 Nel 1925 ebbe un grave infortunio e rimase paralizzata, dopo un anno lavorando con specialisti e seguendo terapie di riabilitazione riuscì a recitare di nuovo.

 Fu anche nota per essere una avida e discreta bridgista.

 Ebbe due brevi matrimoni dai quali non ebbe nessun figlio, il primo con Guy Coombs, attore (1913-1916) e il secondo con John Marshall Gunnerson, mercante (1923–1925).

 Morì l'11 febbraio del 1974 a Hemet in una cittadina della California centrale affacciata sul Diamond Valley Lake.

Anna Quirentia Nilsson (March 30, 1888 – February 11, 1974) was a Swedish born American actress who achieved success in American silent movies.

Anna Q. Nilsson was born in Ystad, Skåne County, Sweden in 1888.

Her middle name, "Quirentia " is derived from her date of birth, March 30 Saint Quirinius' Day.

When she was 8 years old her father got a job at the local sugar factory in Hasslarp, a small community outside Helsingborg in Sweden where she spent most of her school years.

She did very well in school, graduating with highest marks. Due to her good grades she was hired as sales clerk in Halmstad on the Swedish west coast, unusual for a young woman from a worker's family at the time. But she had set her mind on going to America.

In 1905, she emigrated to the United States through Ellis Island. In the new country, the Swedish teenager started working as a nursemaid and learned English quickly. Soon she started working as a model.

Already in 1907, she was named "Most beautiful woman in America". Penrhyn Stanlaws (1877–1957), one of the most successful and sought after cover artists of his day, picked Anna Q. Nilsson to become one of his models.

Anna was married to actor Guy Coombs (1916-1916) and to Norwegian-American shoe merchant, John Marshall Gunnerson (1923–1925). Nilsson has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to motion pictures at 6150 Hollywood Boulevard. She was the first Swedish-born actress to receive such an honor.

Nilsson's modeling led her to getting a role in the 1911 film Molly Pitcher. Films of special note for Anna were Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917), Soldiers of Fortune (1919), The Toll Gate and The Luck of the Irish (both 1920), and The Lotus Eater (1921).

She stayed at the Kalem studio for several years, ranked behind their top star Alice Joyce. In the twenties she freelanced successfully for Paramount, First National and many other studios and reached a peak of popularity just before the advent of talkies, despite a serious horse-riding accident which kept her from filming for almost two years. In 1923, she portrayed "Cherry Malotte" in the second movie based upon Rex Beach's The Spoilers, a role that would be played in later versions by Betty Compson (1930), Marlene Dietrich (1942), and Anne Baxter (1955).

In 1921 she returned to Sweden to record Värmlänningarna, her only Swedish movie. In 1926 she was named Hollywood's most popular woman. She welcomed royalty when the Swedish Crown Prince Gustav Adolf (later King Gustaf VI Adolf) and his wife Louise Mountbatten visited Hollywood. In 1928 she struck a record of fan mail, 30 000 letters a month, and that year Joseph Kennedy brought her to his newly formed film company Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO). The following year as she was horse riding, she fell off the horse, was thrown against a stone wall and breaking her hip. After a year of hard training she was on her feet again.

In 1928, Anna Nilsson made her last film of the silent era, Blockade. With the introduction of sound films, Nilsson's career went into a sharp decline, although she continued to play small, often uncredited parts in films into the 1950s. Between 1930 and 1950, she participated in 39 sound films, in smaller roles. She played the role of the Swedish immigrant grandmother of Loretta Young in The Farmers Daughter (1947). Her best known performance in a sound film is arguably her turn as "herself", referred to as one of Swanson's "waxworks" in Sunset Boulevard (1950), where she has one small line. That she'd be remembered for her one role in Sunset Boulevard is in irony to the hundreds of silent films she appeared in.

She died in Hemet, California on February 11, 1974 of heart failure.

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