The Warrens of Virginia
The Warrens of Virginia was a 1924 romantic drama from the silent film era, whose plot revolved around a love story in which a man who leaves his Southern sweetheart to fight for the Union in the Civil War. No known prints survive, making it a lost movie, and the film is best known today for the death of its star, Martha Mansfield (1899 – 1923) in a freak accident on set.
Martha Mansfield was a New Yorker who was set her mind from an early age on becoming an actress. At age 14, she secured a role in a Broadway play, and took side gigs as an artists’ model and a dancer in musicals. In 1917, she was signed up by one of the forerunners of what would become Warner Bros. Studios, and performed in three short movies.
The following year, she appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies – a popular series of theatrical revue productions that ran on Broadway from 1907 to 1934, and combined music, dance, and sketches. In 1919, she relocated to California to pursue a full time acting career, and caught her first big break the following year, when she was cast opposite superstar John Barrymore in 1920’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
By 1923, Mansfield was a rising star who had come a long way in a short time. On Thanksgiving day that year, she was in San Antonio on the film set of her latest movie, the Civil War love story The Warrens of Virginia. At the end of filming that day, she was hanging out with fellow actors, still in costume and clad in a frilly period dress of a Southern belle, when somebody lit a cigarette and tossed the match. It landed on Mansfield’s dress, which immediately caught fire and went up in a WHOOOSH!
Her co-star saved her face and neck by throwing his overcoat over her, while her chauffer sustained severe hand burns ripping the flaming dress off of her. However, by then she had sustained severe burns over much of her body. Mansfield was rushed to a hospital in San Antonio, but despite the treating doctors’ best efforts, the burns were too extensive, and she died the following day.