Viola Barry (Gladys Viola Wilson) (1894–1964): Actress and Progressive Activist

Viola Barry - 1910 L.A. Herald

Plot 36, Lot 268 W ½ - Wilson Family Plot

Viola Barry, born Gladys Viola Wilson on March 4, 1894, in Evanston, Illinois, was an American stage and silent film actress whose career bridged the stock theater world and the early motion picture industry. She was the daughter of Jackson Stitt Wilson, the Socialist minister, lecturer, and later mayor of Berkeley, and she grew up in an unusually political household for a future actress. 

Raised in Berkeley, Barry came of age in an atmosphere shaped by reform politics, suffrage, and socialism. A 1910 Los Angeles Herald profile made her lineage central to her public identity, describing her as the daughter of Stitt Wilson and presenting her as intellectually aligned with progressive causes. That same article portrayed her as a supporter of woman suffrage and as a young actress with strong views on women’s independence and public life.

Viola Barry - Politics and Artistry meet

Her theatrical training included time in England, where contemporary newspaper accounts say she joined a Shakespearean company and performed major roles including Viola, Juliet, Portia, and Rosalind. By late 1910, the Los Angeles Herald reported that she had spent four years on the stage, including two with Benson’s well-known Shakespearean company, and was poised to become the new ingenue for the Belasco company.

Her most notable films included, Evangeline (1911), The Sea Wolf (1913), Martin Eden (1914) and John Barleycorn (1914). Her final film was The Flying Torpedo (1916), co-written by the legendary writer, director and producer D.W. Griffith, remembered today for The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Viola Barry and Jack Conway in The Land of Might (1912)

The October and December 1910 Herald pieces also show that Barry was marketed not simply as a beauty or ingénue, but as a serious-minded actress with unconventional opinions. One interviewer emphasized her independence, her dislike of conventional social restrictions on women, and the influence of a household steeped in public causes.

In February 1911, she married Hugh Ryan “Jack” Conway, the future film director and actor. The marriage lasted until 1918 and produced a daughter, Rosemary. She later married Frank McGrew Willis, the screenwriter and playwright who is buried with her in the Wilson Family plot. 

The Wilson family plot links several notable figures at once — Stitt Wilson, Viola Barry, her sister Violette, brother-in-law Irving Pichel, and Frank McGrew Willis — creating an unusually rich intersection of Berkeley socialism, early stage culture, screenwriting, and Hollywood history, including McCarthyism. [Read about the others HERE].

Barry worked in films during the 1910s and is remembered today chiefly as a silent-era actress whose life connected the reform politics of Berkeley to the emerging culture industries of stage and screen. 

She died in Los Angeles on April 2, 1964. Though never as famous as some of the men around her, her biography remains valuable for what it reveals about early twentieth-century California: the close overlap of politics, repertory theater, and the new world of motion pictures. 

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Sources: Ancestry.com; Los Angeles Herald, Oct. 30, 1910, p. 31; Los Angeles Herald, Nov. 24, 1910, p. 4; Los Angeles Herald, Dec. 6, 1910, p. 7; Wikipedia, “Viola Barry”; Find a Grave memorial for Viola Barry; Find a Grave memorial for Jack Conway.