Pauline Frederick’s film career began with Famous Players in 1915. “Her fame was not founded upon mere beauty – wrote Adela Rogers St. Johns – nor upon a dazzling personality, though she had both. Public and critics considered her one of the finest actresses the silver sheet had ever known, many considered her the finest. And with reason. Then, suddenly, at the height of her success, in the very prime of her beauty and genius, she slipped into a series of unworthy and inadequate pictures and has practically vanished from the screen. The fans still clamour for her. When such a performance as she gave in the fine picture Smouldering Fires reminds them of her, they pour in letters of demand upon us”. “Pauline Frederick went through the worst attack of stage fright I ever witnessed”, said Clarence Brown. “She had been a great Broadway star and had made a number of pictures. Her last real success had been Madame X (1920). The first two days on this one I thought she was going to give up. But she was a great artist and she pulled through bravely. When I made This Modern Age (1931) she came over to play Joan Crawford’s mother. It was Smouldering Fires that got me my contract with Norma Talmadge. John Considine was then working with Joe Schenck: one night he had nothing to do, so he dropped into the Forum Theatre, Los Angeles. He didn’t even know what picture was playing. He came in after the titles, and thought Lubitsch had made it – until he saw the credits. He called me on the phone the next day and started talking about a contract. I was in the middle of The Goose Woman”. Lubitsch had made a picture with a somewhat similar plot called Three Women, with Pauline Frederick and May McAvoy, in which a man pursues an affair with the mother before his interest turns to her daughter. It was released earlier in 1924, and was undoubtedly an influence on this. So was Cecil B. DeMille’s Triumph, which largely took place in a factory.

Kevin Brownlow