Carla Laemmle

Carla Laemmle was an American actress and dancer whose screen career stretched across nearly nine decades. Born in Chicago, she was a niece of Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle and first appeared on film in 1925 as an uncredited ballet dancer in the silent The Phantom of the Opera (1925). She later took a small uncredited part in the early talkie Dracula (1931), playing a bespectacled passenger in the carriage with Renfield. Through the late 1930s she continued in minor roles, then vanished from the screen, returning briefly as a vampire in The Vampire Hunters Club (2001). In 2009 she co-wrote Growing Up with Monsters, a book of rhymes about her years at Universal from 1921 to 1937. She also appeared in documentaries, among them A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss, where she discussed working with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi, and Moguls and Movie Stars. She died in 2014.