Olive Carey

It’s easy to dismiss Olive Carey as just being the wife of Harry Carey and the mother of a different Harry Carey. To be fair, it is kind of why she’s on the schedule. Her husband was a famous actor. Her son was a famous actor. Might as well put her in the middle, since she did some acting herself. But of course, I do at least a bit of research into people before writing the article—usually; sometimes, I know so much about them already that I don’t have to. But in Olive Carey’s case, it was necessary. And there’s more there than just who she was related to.

Though, in fact, her father was a vaudeville performer, and two of her sisters have Wikipedia pages. Still, her own career dates back to 1913 and silent movies. (Either Sorrowful Jones or “The Sorrowful Shore,” depending on whom you believe; IMDb even suggests it was 1912’s “The Vintage of Fate.”) She did a ton of films, mostly shorts, under her birth name of Olive Golden. All three sisters would drop out of film, probably from getting married—one of them died at age 31, and I can’t find out of what. Olive returned to acting in 1931, alongside her husband in Trader Horn.

And this is one of the moments where we must look at Olive Golden Carey as her own person. The making of Trader Horn was apparently a miserable affair. Louis B. Mayer decided they should film in Africa. He sent the cast there. Many of them, including director W. S. Van Dyke, contracted malaria. Lead actress Edwina Booth contracted something and spent years recovering, eventually retiring from acting. Olive was paid $300. She was brought back from Africa and fired. Mayer changed his mind about shelving the film and insisted the whole cast return for reshoots. Olive was not under contract to MGM and informed Mayer she would indeed return—for a thousand dollars a day. As Mayer needed her if the film was to be completed, he gave in.

It seems likely she took the role to spend time with her husband, since it was one of only three movies she made between 1916 and 1951, plus a few episodes of a serial. Shame the experience was so miserable, really; that may be why she went back into retirement until after her husband’s death. Of course, that was in time for the great height of the Western era. While not all of her work in those days was Westerns, much of it was. Including an appearance in The Searchers, putting her solidly in the classic Hollywood Western pantheon.

In 1966, at age seventy, she retired again. Fair enough. Westerns were drying up, and she was not a young woman. Her last film was Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, and that’s probably enough to get anyone to retire. All things considered, it’s hard to blame her. She was never on her own a great name in Hollywood; I’m not sure she was ever billed very highly unless it was in alphabetical order. But she may have gotten John Wayne roles despite his odd walk, and she got the best of Louis B. Mayer, and anyway she was there. She kept going.