Nola Luxford

Nola Luxford, OBE (23 December 1895 – 10 October 1994) was a New Zealand-born American film actress, spanning from the silent film era to the 1930s. During the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, She was also a writer and pioneer broadcaster, providing a daily radio programme for audiences in Australia and New Zealand.

Born Adelaide Minola Pratt in Hunterville, New Zealand on 23 December 1895, and raised in Hastings, New Zealand, Nola was the eldest of three children of Adelaide Agnes McGonagle, a schoolteacher, and Ernest Augustus Pratt, a draper.

She would later:

She left in 1919 for Hollywood to pursue a career in film acting. She was 23 years old and determined to distinguish herself after a family scandal in New Zealand. Her first film appearance was in the 1920 film The Tiger's Coat. From 1920 through 1927 she would appear in thirteen films, starring opposite and alongside such actors as Bill Cody, Jack Holt, and Carmel Myers. In 1932 she gave a daily one-hour radio report on the Olympics at Los Angeles for New Zealand and Australia, relayed "down under" by short-wave radio. She made six film appearances between 1932-1935, with the only credited ones of any notability being The Iron Master (starring Reginald Denny) and Lost in Limehouse (starring Laura La Plante), both in 1933. She retired after 1935, and settled in Pasadena, California.

She founded the Anzac Club of New York, and through her wartime radio broadcasts she became known as the "Angel of the Anzacs". She was awarded the OBE for her services.

Her first husband, Maurice George "Maurie" Luxford, whom she wed in 1919, died. She married, secondly, to William Bauernschmidt. She married her third husband, Glenn Russell Dolberg, in 1959; he died in 1977. She became a naturalized United States citizen on 12 November 1928. She continued to live in Pasadena, California, where she died on 10 October 1994, aged 98. She was survived by five nieces and one nephew.

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