Once again, we are looking at someone whose films I don’t know. There are some available on YouTube, but her career was essentially over well before the coming of sound, and she died in 1938. She is known as the first movie star, and she is an early example of how badly the system treated individuals and how very important protections have been. There’s nothing the system could have done to prevent her from getting sick—both of the diseases she has been speculated to have had are genetic—but there’s a lot that could have been done to improve her life before then.

In the early days of movies, the studios didn’t credit their performers by name, in the assumption that this would create demand for specific performers and cause them to ask for more money, cutting into the studios’ profits. So Lawrence, whose start in vaudeville was when she was three, was initially credited as “the Biograph Girl.” And as such, fans demanded to see her in movies. Rival studio Independent Moving Pictures Company lured her away with an increased salary, and she was credited as “the IMP Girl” before being listed under her own name.

At least sort of—the first person credited by name already had a stage name. Her mother had acted under the name of Lotta Lawrence, and Florence, born Bridgwood, used her mother’s stage name. She’s also, at the age of six, been credited as “Baby Flo, the Child Wonder.” Still. In those days, it was even hard to poach actors from other studios, because how did you know the name of the person you were trying to poach? Lawrence had a fan base, but it didn’t do her any good until people knew her name.

Even acting under her own name was limited protection, however; in 1915, she was filming a movie called Pawns of Destiny and was seriously burned in a staged fire. She also broke her back in a fall. Universal, which was producing the film, wouldn’t pay her medical expenses, even though she was injured filming a stunt. Arguably it ended her film career. She made a few movies after that, but between the trauma and the actual physical harm, she was unable to work for long enough for her star to set. She started a company selling makeup to the studios, but in the Depression, she lost that as well—she’s also an example of an early star who made bad financial decisions. Toward the end of her life, she was reliant on Louis B. Mayer, who hired on old, destitute stars at $75 a week.

Another failing on her part beyond bad business decisions was not patenting her inventions. She created an “auto signaling arm,” a sort of mechanical turn signal, and a mechanical brake signal. She patented neither, and of course they were eventually rendered obsolete. Still, between that and the makeup store, she might have been a little better off if she’d been more careful in her finances. She definitely would have been better off if the studio had taken better care of her. Yes, it turns out they were right and named performers asked for more money, but there’s no excuse for not taking care of people injured on set, no matter how much you were paying them.

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