Laura La Plante (born Laura Laplante; November 1, 1904 – October 14, 1996) was an American film actress, whose more notable performances were in the silent era. Early life La Plante was born in St. Louis, Missouri on November 1, 1904, the daughter of William A. Laplante and Elizabeth E. Turk. Her father taught dancing. After her parents were divorced, her mother took Laura and her sister Violet to live in San Diego, California. In her teens, Laura stayed with Mary MacMahon, her cousin, in Hollywood during a summer vacation and replied to a newspaper ad asking for children for moving pictures, and she was hired. Silent film career La Plante made her acting debut at age 15, and in 1923, she was named as one of that year's WAMPAS Baby Stars. During the 1920s, she appeared in more than 60 films. Her early films include Big Town Round-Up (1921), with cowboy star Tom Mix, the serials Perils of the Yukon (1922), Around the World in Eighteen Days (1923), and several movies with Hoot Gibson. The majority of the films starring La Plante (from 1921 to 1930) were made for Universal Pictures. During this period, she was the studio's most popular star, "an accomplishment duplicated only by Deanna Durbin years later", and almost always enjoyed top billing. One of La Plante's early surviving films is the 1925 film Smouldering Fires, directed by Clarence Brown and costarring Pauline Frederick. Her best-remembered film is arguably the silent classic The Cat and the Canary (1927), but she achieved acclaim for Skinner's Dress Suit (1926), with Reginald Denny, the part-sound The Love Trap (1929), directed by William Wyler, and the 1929 part-sound Show Boat (1929), adapted from the novel of the same name by Edna Ferber. Although this last film was an adaptation of the novel, and not of the famous musical play adapted from the 1926 novel, some songs from the play were included in the film as box-office insurance. She did not sing in the movie; her singing was dubbed by Eva Olivetti, one of the early examples in which this was done in a movie. A scene of La Plante in Show Boat was broadcast in the early days of British television. Transition to sound films The advent of sound films effectively shortened her career. In her mid-20s, La Plante was a natural and appealing presence in early sound films, but