Lorna Moon

Lorna Moon (born Nora Helen Wilson Low; 16 June 1886 – 1 May 1930) was a British author and screenwriter from the early days of Hollywood. She is best known as the author of the bestselling novel Dark Star (1929) and as one of the earliest and most successful female screenwriters. As a screenwriter, she developed screenplays for notables including Gloria Swanson, Norma Shearer, Lionel Barrymore and Greta Garbo.

Life

Moon was born in Strichen, Aberdeenshire, in 1886, to plasterer Charles Low and Margaret Benzies (1863–1945). She was a socialist and an avowed atheist. In 1907 she met William Hebditch, a commercial traveller from Yorkshire who had stayed at the hotel run by her parents. The two were secretly married in Aberdeen and shortly after the couple left Britain for Alberta in Canada, where Moon gave birth to her first child, William Hebditch (1908–1990). In 1913 she left Hebditch and had a relationship with Walter Moon, with whom she had a child, Mary Leonore Moon (1914–1978). She and Walter travelled to Winnipeg, where she began working as a journalist and where she adopted a pen-name closer to her literary inspiration, Lorna Doone.

An anecdote tells how she contacted Cecil B. DeMille and offered a critical appraisal of the screenplays of the day. He challenged her to come to Hollywood and write them herself if she thought she could do better; and by 1921 she did just that, working as a script girl and screenwriter. During her career in Hollywood she had a third child by Cecil B. DeMille's brother William. This child, Richard, grew up unaware of his mother's identity; in later years he discovered his parentage and wrote the memoir My Secret Mother, Lorna Moon.