Rita Jolivet

Jolivet was an intimate of the inner society circles in London and a close friend of the family of Lord Lowther, the British ambassador to Turkey.

Inez had performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and was decorated by both King Edward VII and Czar Nicholas II.

[1] Jolivet played the role of Marsinah in the first American stage production, produced by Harrison Grey Fiske, of Kismet in 1911.

[1] Jolivet was a passenger on the RMS Lusitania on 7 May 1915, when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sank in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Ireland, 19 kilometres (12 mi) off the Old Head of Kinsale.

Jolivet testified in the Federal District Court during a hearing regarding a petition of the Cunard Steamship Company, which owned the Lusitania.

Inez became depressed following her husband's death and committed suicide by shooting herself at Sumner Apartments, 31 West 11th Street, New York City on 28 July 1915.

[1] Her mother, Mary Cummins Brown, and her three-year-old son, Alfred Scott Witherbee Jr, died in the sinking, and she never publicly discussed it afterwards.

[4] After World War II the couple took up travelling again and sold Ballinkinrain to move to a smaller castle in Scotland, where they threw parties with royalty, heads of state and many other famous people on their lengthy guest lists.

She returned to Italy to make Teodora (1921), in which she portrayed the Empress Theodora in a famous romance by the French dramatist Victorien Sardou; historians disagree about the character of the wife of the Emperor Justinian, but the film depicted both her as beautiful and charming.

In 1917 Jolivet and Vincent Serrano made One Law for Both; the drama, directed by Ivan Abramson, illustrated the "secret and stirring methods of revolutionaries".

Jolivet and her husband Count Giuseppe de Cippico donated the proceeds from Lest We Forget (1918) to 'the alleviation of suffering caused by World War I.'

She was an avid Liberty Bond booster, and it was reported that she sold more of them throughout the United States than Douglas Fairbanks, Sr, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford combined.

Rita Jolivet and House Peters in The Unafraid (1915)
An International Marriage (1916)
Lest We Forget (1918)