Actress;

 

Barbara Kent, who has died in California at the age of 103, was one of the last of the silent movie stars, if not the last.

 

Kent was no mere bit-player, but a genuine star in her day, though it is three-quarters of a century since she retired.

She appeared with Greta Garbo in the silent classic Flesh and the Devil (1926) and in talkies with the likes of Gloria Swanson and Edward G. Robinson.

 

The diminutive actress, who was said to be under 5ft tall, was even lusted after by a sleazy, villainous Oliver Hardy in the days before he became a comic icon.

 

She was born Barbara Klowtmann or Cloutman on a farm in Alberta, probably in 1907, though some sources say 1906.

She moved to California with her parents in her teens and won a local beauty contest, which led to a movie contract, though she maintained she never intended to become an actress.

 

Flesh and the Devil was one of her first films. She played a young woman who is in love with a soldier, played by John Gilbert, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars at the time.

But Gilbert is besotted with a femme fatale, played by Garbo, in what was one of her first Hollywood roles. It all ends in tears.

 

The film was a major hit, but the fortunes of its principals varied. Garbo became Gilbert’s lover during shooting and went on to be one of the biggest stars in the world.

Gilbert’s career however stalled with the coming of sound the following year. Meanwhile Kent built on her early success in a wide variety of films.

 

In the western No Man’s Law (1927) she played the daughter of Scots actor Jimmy Finlayson and is menaced by a villainous Oliver Hardy, who is after their mine.

Finlayson would later appear in several Laurel and Hardy comedies, while Kent served as leading lady for another comic legend Harold Lloyd in Welcome Danger (1929) and Feet First (1930).

 

She also proved herself in serious drama, playing Amelia Sedley in an adaptation of Vanity Fair (1932) and Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist (1933).

 

However she scaled down her film commitments after marrying a Hollywood agent in 1932 and by the mid-1930s she had effectively retired. After the death of her first husband, she married an aircraft engineer and went on to qualify as a pilot.

 

Latterly she lived at a country club in Palm Desert, California. She rarely spoke of her time in movies, sometimes even denying that she had been an actress.