American actor and film producer
Sister of actress Mary MacLaren.
Great favourite of President Woodrow Wilson.
Conducted a public feud with her actress-sister Mary MacLaren.
Blonde, blue-eyed silent screen star of romantic melodramas in the 1920s, a former model. She was one of the first actresses to set up her own production company, Katherine MacDonald Pictures (1919-1921). She was a significant box-office earner for First National and B.P. Schulberg, starring opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Thomas Meighan and William S. Hart. After her retirement from acting, she ran a cosmetics business.
Her second marriage, to Christian Holmes, heir to the Fleischmann Yeast fortune, ended in sensational headlines in 1931, when she claimed he kept her locked in a cage, and he charged her with marital infidelity.
Suffered from diabetes in her later years, which resulted in having a leg amputated in 1954.