Lucille Ricksen (born Ingeborg Myrtle Elisabeth Ericksen; August 22, 1910 – March 13, 1925) was an American motion picture actress during the silent film era.

[6] By the time Lucille was eight, her parents had divorced and her mother reportedly began to view the income from her daughter's acting career as a primary source of stability for her entire family.

[9] She was next cast in the 1922 Stuart Paton directed comedy The Married Flapper opposite Marie Prevost and Kenneth Harlan and the 13-year-old's career opportunities began to improve dramatically.

Her first assigned role as the leading female actress in a major film was in the 1923 movie The Rendezvous;[12] a World War I satire in which she was cast as a deaf[13] Russian peasant girl named Vera.

[14] Another notable performance Ricksen undertook in 1923 was her role as Ginger in the John Griffith Wray directed drama Human Wreckage: a drug prevention film produced by and starring actress Dorothy Davenport.

[15] Initially, her true age was accurately reported in the press, with one typical editorial, the Covington Republic, appraising her in February 1923 as being "The youngest leading lady on the screen".

[16] From 1920 to 1925, Ricksen starred opposite some of the most popular actors of the silent era, including Conrad Nagel, James Kirkwood, Sr., Jack Pickford, Louise Fazenda, Laura La Plante, Anna Q. Nilsson, Blanche Sweet, Bessie Love, Cullen Landis and Patsy Ruth Miller, although the number of contracts and thus the required hours to be devoted to her career increased dramatically, with Ricksen completing no fewer than 10 films within a seven-month period within 1924 alone, [16] often portraying characters who were much older than she was.

[3] In 1924, at age 14, Ricksen was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars; a promotional campaign sponsored by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers in the United States, which honored thirteen young women each year who they believed to be on the threshold of movie stardom.

Nonetheless, Ricksen was visited on a weekly basis by film director and screenwriter Paul Bern, who brought her flowers and would read magazines to her while he held her hand.

[22] After Ricksen's death, the media extensively reported that her illness had been created through a combination of malnutrition and exhaustion[23] due to her working almost non-stop for twelve years, largely under poor conditions and at the insistence of both her mother and her agents.