Notable Residents

Long before Elvira, long before the televised horror host became a genre in itself there was Vampira. She was pale, impossibly thin, black-haired and utterly unlike anything that had ever been seen on television. Behind the character was Maila Nurmi, a very intelligent, very eccentric and fiercely independent woman who created one of the most enduring of all television icons of the 1950s and then spent the rest of her life both in the shadow of and defending that icon.

There was never anything ordinary about Udo Kier. With his pale blue eyes, sculpted features and slightly dangerous air, he could enter a film for only a few minutes and somehow alter its temperature. Directors used him as a vampire, a sadist, a Nazi, a wealthy eccentric, a supernatural apparition and, late in life, a flamboyant retired hairdresser. He moved effortlessly between exploitation pictures, European art films and Hollywood blockbusters, accumulating more than 200 screen credits during a career that lasted nearly six decades. Yet behind the cultivated menace was a funny, sociable and remarkably unsentimental man who had survived a childhood of genuine hardship before spending his adult life creating characters audiences could not forget.

Doris Race did not live until she was thirteen, but by that time she had already experienced more adventure in her brief life than most adults achieve over many decades. She had ridden lively horses in Canada, earned prizes for her horsemanship, received a gold medal from the Governor-General, had appeared before motion-picture cameras, and had become a well-known figure in the Hollywood riding circles. Because she was small in stature, always well balanced, and fearless when riding, she was just as much remembered for her elegance as for her ability. At the time of her sudden death in February 1922, nearly a thousand people came to pay their last respects and her horse, which had never been ridden, went with the coffin to Hollywood Cemetery.

Long before Benedict Canyon became one of Los Angeles's most exclusive residential enclaves, its steep hillsides and twisting ravines belonged to a very different Southern California. There were no secluded celebrity estates, no procession of automobiles winding through the canyon, and certainly no paved Benedict Canyon Drive connecting Beverly Hills with the San Fernando Valley. There were oak and chaparral-covered hills, wildlife, streams, scattered homesteads—and a pioneer named Edson Abijah Benedict, whose family settled there in 1868 and gave the canyon the name it still carries more than a century and a half later.

Julia Boynton Green was born into an old American family that valued education and independence. She was born on May 25, 1861, in Byron, New York. Her family history included Nathanael Greene, a general of the Continental Army known for his intelligence and leadership during the American Revolutionary War’s Southern Campaign. Like her famous relative, Julia Boynton Green led a remarkable life full of quiet accomplishment.

Few critics have ever achieved what Jonathan Gold did: he altered the way the city saw itself. Although he wrote about food, he also dealt with neighborhoods, immigration, culture, class, memory, and the people who are responsible for making Los Angeles what it is. When he died in 2018, Gold had become one of the city's most distinctive voices and the first restaurant critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Today Agnes Ayres is mainly remembered as Lady Diana Mayo, the beautiful and headstrong heroine who played opposite Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik. Nevertheless, her career went beyond that one film; at one time she was among Paramount's most well-known actresses, worked with Cecil B. DeMille and other prominent filmmakers, experienced wealth and fame, and appeared to have a secure position in Hollywood. Unfortunately, her later years became a sad illustration of how quickly silent-film fame could disappear.

Very few people who visit Hollywood Forever Cemetery know that an important individual in Rudolph Valentino's early years in Hollywood is interred just a few feet from the famous crypt of the silent film idol. Although thousands go there every year to pay their respects to Valentino, they usually fail to recognize the crucial part that Maxwell Karger played in launching the career of one of cinema's first international superstars.

Among the many forgotten pioneers resting at Hollywood Forever Cemetery is a man who spent much of his life challenging the accepted medical wisdom of his day. Dr. Thomas Powell was a physician, author, lecturer, sanitarium founder, and one of the most controversial medical figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Admired by supporters as a visionary and dismissed by critics as a crank, Powell became nationally known as the "germ-eater," a nickname earned through a series of astonishing public experiments in which he deliberately exposed himself to disease-causing organisms to prove his theories. Today, his story remains one of the most unusual in Hollywood Forever's long history.

Thousands of actors, directors, producers, and performers are buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Many of their names once shone brightly on marquees around the world. Yet, some of the cemetery’s most fascinating residents never chased fame. Rose Edith Williams was a humble housekeeper who kept a big secret, only becoming one of Los Angeles’s most talked-about women after her death.

Long before Hollywood conjured images of movie stars, red carpets, and studio moguls, it was a quiet agricultural community where residents knew each other by name, and the local doctor may have bicycled many miles to make a house call. Few residents saw -- and wrote about—Hollywood's metamorphosis better than Dr. Edwin Obadiah Palmer. Physician, civic leader, founder of Hollywood Hospital and Research Center, historian, and author of History of Hollywood, Palmer devoted nearly 60 years to helping develop the community he chronicled.

Mae Dix stands out in the colorful history of Burlesque. While her name is not as well-known today as Sally Rand, Gypsy Rose Lee, or Ann Corio, entertainment historians have credited her as the originator of the striptease for many years. Although it is uncertain whether Mae Dix truly invented the act, most agree she perfected it and helped make it a defining part of twentieth-century burlesque. No matter what, she made a lasting impact on the art of stage seduction.