LORNA BALFOUR

Perusing a who's who I came across the name Lorna Balfour, who played Beryl Mercer's daughter in a Janet Gaynor-Charles Farrell programmer for Fox Film, MERRILY MARY ANN (1931). The following year she was dead at 19. After surgery according to the IMDb website. Okay not much but was there more? Of course there was. She was really Lorna Noy, the British-born daughter of Wilfred Noy (1883-1948), a British actor/director briefly in Hollywood 1925-1929. Noy's chief claim to fame was that he was the maternal uncle of film and stage star Leslie Howard. Lorna Noy, as she billed herself, came to Hollywood in her teens and ended up

playing a foil to rubber-legged comic Leon Errol in a Los Angeles stage run of the farce "Lost Sheep" and supporting Bebe Daniels in a Henry Duffy production of "The Last of Mrs. Cheyney." With her connection to Wilfred Noy abd Leslie Howard motion pictures seemed if not inevitable then at least an obvious posdibility but MERRILY MARY ANN became her lone screen appearance. We don't know what illnes she had that necessitated the fatal operation and hope that someone may enlighten us. Suffice it to say she was only 19 when she passed away and sadly left nothing behind. Even her home in what is today West Hollywood, 2402 Laurel Pass, is of this writing just an empty overgrown lot.