Mary Kornman
The leading girl of the silent Our Gang, and the daughter of the man who photographed it.
Mary Kornman, born Mary Agnes Evans, was the leading female star of the Our Gang series during the Pathé silent era.
She came to the series through the camera department: her father was a stills photographer at the Hal Roach studio. That is a common enough route into early Hollywood and it says something about how the industry recruited children.
Like the rest of the silent Our Gang cast she aged out of the series. She worked into the 1930s and then left films.
She succeeded Peggy Cartwright as the girl of the gang and stayed from 1922 to 1926, more than forty shorts, which is longer than most of the boys managed. Her mother, Verna Comer, appeared in films as well. Her younger sister Mildred followed her into the series. After the silents Roach brought her back with Mickey Daniels for The Boy Friends between 1930 and 1932, and then she went into features: College Humor and Flying Down to Rio in 1933, The Desert Trail with John Wayne in 1935, and the serial Queen of the Jungle the same year. Small parts. Steady work.
She married the cinematographer Leo Tover in 1934 and divorced him around 1938. In 1940 she married Ralph McCutcheon, who trained horses for Westerns, and stopped acting the same year. She died of cancer in Glendale, California, on June 1, 1973, aged fifty seven. Her father's job is the reason the Roach files on the early Our Gang are as well photographed as they are: Eugene Kornman shot the stills, and the child in front of his camera was often his own daughter. The Photoplay portrait from June 1926 in this file was made at the end of her run.
Facts on this file are checked against the Wikipedia article Mary Kornman. The wording is ours. Nothing about the photograph is asserted beyond the credit the file itself carries, and that credit is usually a studio rather than a person: stills departments were staff jobs and the photographer's name went unrecorded. Confident attributions in the trade are mostly inherited guesses.
About Mary Kornman
What happened to Mary Kornman after Our Gang
She aged out in 1926, at ten, and came back to Roach in 1930 as a teenager for The Boy Friends, a two-year series with Mickey Daniels. Feature work followed through the 1930s, including Flying Down to Rio in 1933 and The Desert Trail with John Wayne in 1935. She married the cameraman Leo Tover in 1934, then the horse trainer Ralph McCutcheon in 1940, and retired from the screen that year. She stayed married to McCutcheon until her death.
How did Mary Kornman die
Cancer, on June 1, 1973, in Glendale, California, at fifty seven. She had been out of the business for more than thirty years and had made no effort to trade on the series after The Little Rascals went to television in the 1950s and made the later cast famous again. Her death was noted mainly in the trade press. Her sister Mildred, also a Roach child performer, outlived her by many years.
Were Mary Kornman and Mickey Daniels a couple
On screen, from 1922 to 1926 and again from 1930 to 1932, when Roach paired them as teenagers in The Boy Friends. In 1933 they appeared together once more in Fish Hooky, playing adults, with Daniels as a truant officer. Off screen there is no documented romance. She married Leo Tover in 1934; he married and worked in construction. The pairing was a studio idea that audiences liked, and the studio kept it as long as it sold.
Filed alongside
