Notable Residents

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.

At Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where movie legends and real history mix, one grave often confuses visitors searching for famous names. When people see the name “Hitchcock” on a headstone, many think they have found the grave of the famous director Alfred Hitchcock. But that’s not the case. Alfred Hitchcock was cremated in 1980, and his ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean. The Hitchcock buried at Hollywood Forever is actually Dr. William Wesley Hitchcock, a well-known Los Angeles doctor and surgeon whose story is tied to the city’s early civic and medical history, long before Hollywood became known for movies.

Anne Heche stood out among actresses of her generation for living openly and honestly. Long before most people discussed sexual fluidity, she was caught in a cultural debate she never asked for. She gained fame through her movies, but headlines often focused on her personal life. People remember her for her talent, her struggles, and her determination not to let others define her. In an industry obsessed with image, Anne often pushed back against the idea that identity is simple or easy to label.

When the history of the AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles is written, the names most often remembered are the politicians, physicians, and activists who became public faces of the crisis. Yet among those who quietly shaped the city's response from the earliest days was Hugh O. Rice, a man whose influence reached beyond headlines and television cameras. For more than two decades, Rice dedicated his life to serving the LGBTQ community, helping transform a small community clinic into one of the nation's most important centers for health care, advocacy, and support. He was not a firebrand. He was something rarer: a steady hand in a time of panic.

Long before Hollywood acknowledged queer identity, addiction, and sexual freedom, Pepi Lederer lived dangerously and restlessly at the center of one of its most glamorous and scandalous circles. Beautiful, reckless, and charismatic but emotionally adrift, Pepi moved through the lavish world of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst like a bright flame—driven, searching, and ultimately self-destructive. Her short life brimmed with privilege, wild parties, forbidden romances, painful addiction, and tragedy, ending in a shocking suicide that sent tremors through the Hearst empire in 1935.

If Louis B. Mayer built the MGM dream factory, Adrian was the one who decided how it looked. More than any actor, director, or producer, Adrian shaped Hollywood glamour during its Golden Age. The broad-shouldered Joan Crawford look, Greta Garbo's sharp elegance, Jean Harlow's smooth sophistication, Katharine Hepburn's tailored style, and even Dorothy's ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz all came from the mind of one man: Gilbert Adrian Greenburg, known simply as Adrian. For over a decade, his credit, "Gowns by Adrian," became as familiar to moviegoers as the stars themselves. Still, Adrian's story is also one of many queer stories that were visible in Hollywood but rarely spoken about openly.