English: Publicity photo of Mary Alden from Stars of the Photoplay. Mary Alden, the "great American mother" of the screen, is one of D. W. Griffith's finds. She was born in New Orleans and educated in the Notre Dame College in Montreal. She studied at the Art Student's League in New York. Happening to know the sister of Rose Melville, the inimitable "Sis Hopkins," she entered the Baldwin-Melville stock company. An engagement with Mrs. Fiske followed, and then, quite by accident, she found herself in pictures. She came into prominence by her splendid work as Lydia Brown, the mulatto housekeeper, in "The Birth of a Nation."