Carol Holloway

Although perhaps not in a league with Pearl White and Ruth Roland, Carol Holloway (sometimes credited as Halloway) was one of the early silent screen's great serial queens. The daughter of a college professor, Holloway began her professional career with the Carleton Stock Company and later appeared on Broadway in Every Woman. By 1914, she was appearing in one-reel Billy van Dusen comedies with the now forgotten John Steppling, a good enough introduction apparently to the wild and woolly world of Vitagraph serials, of which The Fighting Trail (1917) with William Duncan was her first. They became something of a team and also did five-reel Westerns, but in 1918 Duncan replaced Holloway with his wife Edith Johnson. The actress was instead teamed with Antonio Moreno in the 15-chapter serials The Iron Test (1918) and The Perils of Thunder Mountain (1919), sometimes despairing over the sameness of it all. "I've climbed every rock that anybody in the state has ever heard of," she once told a fan-magazine writer, quickly adding that she loved the overall fun and camaraderie of serial-making. Like most of her action heroine contemporaries, Holloway's career slowed down in the more corporate 1920s, but she did appear opposite Tom Mix in the well-received 1925 screen version of Zane Grey's The Rainbow Trail. She continued to act in small roles and as an extra in films until at least 1940. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi