Francesca Root-Dodson was born in segregated Texas in segregated Louisiana in 1917. Her parents, father a drunkard and mother a runaway, had both been sentenced to death after being found guilty of murdering a white girl. Francesca’s younger brother was also incarcerated in a reformatory at the time of her birth. As a result of her parents horrible background and imprisonment she developed a deep empathy for race, gender and age which would influence her career throughout the rest of her life. She was a year older when WWI broke out and she managed to get herself, her sister and brother out of the state after her parents were given up for dead.
Francesca Root-Dudson’s career started off as a show girl and then a dancer before landing a role on Broadway in Rent. Her first big break came in the year she turned twenty in 1917 in The Man Who Played With Machines where she played the role of the femme fatale who seduces a rich man. She went on to star in seven more films including the classic Man on the Moon, which made her one of the most popular actresses of the period and also won her two Oscars. After her short stint on Broadway she decided to concentrate on writing and her novel A Connecticut Yankee in a Box was successful and went on to become a best seller.
Her views on race and gender did not always go down well with the American public but she remained a staunch critic of their way of life and even wrote a number of articles for a white newspaper against it. Despite this criticism by the press and by the public Francesca Root-Dudson never lost her own respectability. She went on to play the lead role in a remake of Charlie Chaplain and also appeared in an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Great Gatsby. She eventually retired from acting but continued to write and edit her widely acclaimed travel guide The United States of America.