Athole Shearer [SEP] sister
Athole Shearer
Athole Shearer Hawks (November 20, 1900 – March 17, 1985) was a Canadian American actress, who was the sister of motion picture star Norma Shearer and MGM film sound engineer Douglas Shearer.
Biography.
Athole Dane Shearer was born in 1900 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. After her parents divorced there when she was a teenager, her brother Douglas remained with their father Andrew, while she and her sister Norma moved to New York City with their mother Edith, who hoped to get her
and charm.
The childhood and adolescence that Shearer once described as "a pleasant dream" ended in 1918, when her father's company collapsed and older sister, Athole, suffered her first serious mental breakdown. Forced to move into a small, dreary house in a "modest" Montreal suburb, the sudden plunge into poverty only strengthened Shearer's determined attitude: "At an early age, I formed a philosophy about failure. Perhaps an endeavor, like my father's business, could fail, but that didn't