Helen Lynch

Voted a WAMPAS Baby Star by the Hollywood publicists in 1923, Helen Lynch specialized in playing "other women," floozies, and gangsters' molls in scores of low-budget silent melodramas of the 1920s. A former beauty contest winner, she had begun her screen career in 1917 supporting Vitagraph comic Jimmy Aubrey before graduating to feature films in the very early '20s. Most of them were gangster melodramas like Fools First (1922) with Richard Dix, or Westerns such as Arizona Sweepstakes (1925) with Hoot Gibson, and more often than not she played a villainess. She was quite good as a hardboiled dame in Josef Von Sternberg's Underworld (1927) and downright vituperative as Clara Bow's nemesis in Ladies of the Mob (1927). Lynch was at one time married to Carroll Nye, a supporting actor noted for playing Scarlet O'Hara's second husband in Gone With the Wind (1939).

~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide