and refused. She also found the director Tom Forman to be a drunk, and was upset that, at her final big scene, he turned up too drunk to direct. When the picture premiered Cooper cried after viewing it, feeling it was the worst movie she'd ever seen. She wrote "After The Broken Wing, I never wanted to make another picture. After all the times I thought I'd retire for good and then came back to films, I finally wound up my career in a stinker made by a drunk. What a hell of an ending." Later years After divorcing Walsh in 1926, Cooper never made another picture. She returned to New York and joined high society playing bridge and shopping. During World War II, Cooper volunteered for Red Cross, handing out doughnuts and writing letters for wounded soldiers. She attended Columbia University in the 1940s to study writing. She bought a farm in Chestertown, Maryland, hoping to be inspired. She wrote a novel and two plays, all of which went unpublished. The plays were based on two of her films and she sent them to FOX, but both were rejected. In the 1950s she moved to Virginia where she started a women's writing club. She continued playing golf, working for charity, and playing bridge. In 1969, a man from the Library of Congress called her, surprised to find she was still alive. Soon after, she began receiving calls from universities and film historians. She was invited to several colleges and screenings of her old films. In 1973 she wrote an autobiography, Dark Lady of the Silents. In 1970 after attending "The D. W. Griffith Film Festival" she had a heart attack which began a series of heart troubles which limited her in her final years. Cooper died at Cedars Nursing Home on April 12, 1976. She had been there since suffering a stroke earlier the same year. Her death left Lillian Gish as the sole surviving cast member of The Birth of a Nation. She is buried in the New Cathedral Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland. Her papers were donated to the Library of Congress. Legacy Cooper is primarily known today for her performances in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Very few of her films are known to survive. Only 3 of her 40 shorts still exist, while only 5 of her 21 features still exist. Her only non-Griffith