Truus, Bob & Jan too! posted a photo:
Vintage British postcard, 1910s. Hepworth Picture Player. P.C. 2. NB IMDb does not list a Alma Taylor film with the title The Girl Who Believed, so it may just be a tagline accentuating what we see.
Alma Taylor (1895-1974) was a British actress, who peeked in the British silent cinema of the 1910s and 1920s. In 1915 readers of Pictures and Picturegoers voted her most popular British performer, beating even Charlie Chaplin. Taylor acted in over 150 films, among which some prestigious examples like Shadow of Egypt (1924) by Sidney Morgan.
Alma Taylor was born in London, on 3 January 1895. According to Anthony Slide, brunette, blue-eyed Alma Taylor was the Hepworth actress 'par excellence'. Beginning in 1907, she already acted with producer Cecil Hepworth, playing tragic young girls. She then co-starred with Chrissie White in Hepworth's 'Tilly Girl' comic series (1910-1915) about two naughty schoolgirls, as well as in 75 or more short and long subjects by Hepworth, such as the Dickens adaptations Oliver Twist (1912), David Copperfield (Thomas Bentley) and The Old Curiosity Shop (Bentley 1913). In those days , everyone helped out at the studios, so both Alma and Chrissie helped in the processing rooms when the weather was too poor to shoot. During the First World War and soon after Taylor contributed to the war effort by acting in such propaganda films like The Nature of the Beast (Hepworth 1919). Taylor clearly was the producer's favorite, and remained devoted to him for decades, starring opposite Ralph Forbes in the rather old-fashioned British countryside drama Comin' Thro the Rye (1923), a remake of an earlier version by Hepworth. After a temporal absence from the screen, Hepworth relaunched Taylor in his last film, The House of Marney (1926), with John Longden. In 1924, the Daily News named her, along with Betty Balfour, Britain's top star. Alma Taylor only starred in four non-Hepworth films: The Shadow of Egypt (Sidney Morgan, 1924) with Joan Morgan, Quinneys (Maurice Elvey, 1927), A South Sea Bubble (T. Hays Hunter 1928) with Ivor Novello, and Two Little Drummer Boys (G.B.Samuelson, 1928). In the late silent era she did some German films, including her part of Mrs. Barrymore in Der Hund von Baskerville/ The Hound of the Baskervilles (Richard Oswald 1929), a film longtime considered lost but rediscovered in 2009. With the coming of sound, however, Taylor's career dwindled and she had to satisfy with minor, matronly roles, in small number of films, such as Bachelor's Baby (Harry Hughes, 1932), Things Are Looking Up (Albert de Courville, 1935), Lilacs in the Spring (Herbert Wilcox, 1954), and Blue Murder at St. Trinian's (Frank Launder, 1957). Uncredited, she played a box office woman in Hitchcock's second vserion of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Probably her last part was the uncredited role of an old lady in the Titanic-drama by Rank, A Night to Remember (Roy Ward Baker 1958). Alma Taylor died in London, 23 January 1974. She was the wife of film producer and director Walter West (1885-1958), who in the late 1910s and early 1920s was the regular director of Violet Hopson, first with his company Broadwest (1914-1921) and then for Hopson's own company.
Sources: IMDB, English Wikipedia, Anthony Slide in Encyclopedia of British Film, www.allmovie.com, www.hepworthfilm.org/alma_taylor.htm.






















