Lorna Moon

Lorna Moon (born Nora Helen Wilson Low; 1886–1930) was a Scottish author and screenwriter from the early days of Hollywood.

She was born in Strichen, Aberdeenshire, in Scotland, in 1886, the daughter of the plasterer Charles Low, a socialist and 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 Scotland for Alberta in Canada, where Lorna Moon gave birth to her first child, William Hebditych (1908–1990), in 1908. In 1913 she left Hebditch and fell in with Walter Moon, with whom she had a child, Mary Leonore Moon (1914–1978), in 1914. 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. Lorna Moon contracted tuberculosis and died in a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1930, aged 44. She was cremated and her ashes were returned to Scotland, to be scattered on Mormond Hill near Strichen.

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