In a career of twenty years she appeared in Great Britain, the United States and in Australia, where she became Queen of the Tivoli Follies.

Thelma Raye was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Hugh Bell-Morton (1847-1900) of Glasgow and Bertha Blanche Caucanas (1859-1932) from France.

Her parents were married on the 1st November 1879 at the British Consulate in Rio de Janeiro,[1] where her father worked as representative of the Commercial Telegram Bureaux.

When Hugh Bell-Morton died after landing from the SS Oravia in Liverpool,[2] the family settled in 51, Kingsley Road, and Raye attended the nearby Girls’ High School in 171, Bedford Street.

[4] In 1906, when she was a chorus girl at Daly's Theatre in London, George Edwardes gave Raye the chance to stand in for Denise Orme in The Little Michus.

[5] For the next three years, Raye appeared in half a dozen Edwardian musical comedies at Daly's and the Gaiety Theatre, of which Our Miss Gibbs (1909) was the most successful.

However, when her husband was touring the United States with East is West in the spring of 1922, she traveled to Adelaide to take part in the twenty-five-minute short film Why Men Go Wrong.

This film, a Wondergraph production directed by Walter Hunt and photographed by Harry Krischock, which was said to show Adelaide autumn fashions, is now considered lost.

[8] Raye also had bit parts in The White Sister and Romola, the two films Colman did with Henry King and Lilian Gish in Italy.

In September Raye announced her intention to „take up nursing and other Red Cross work“ to get to France to be „as near her husband as possible“.

[21][note 2] Dawson got wind of his wife's infidelity and petitioned for divorce in December 1919, citing Colman as co-respondent.

[22] The divorce came through in the following June,[23] and Colman and Raye married on 18 September 1920 at the Registry Office in Hanover Square, London.

Lillian Gish remembered that during the filming of The White Sister in Rome in 1923, „Thelma Colman ran down the hotel corridor crying: „He's dead!

When he came to, he said, „I must have fallen and hit my head.““[28] A bit later, at a masquerade party of the film company, she slapped Colman in the face in front of everyone.

He moved into the apartment of William Powell, Charles Lane and Henry King and sent Raye a message to return to London and accept a weekly allowance.

[36] Raye won the suit on March 24 and received a settlement of $ 25 000 in cash and bonds and a monthly allowance of $ 500 for ten years.

[40] On 31 July 1934, Raye was granted a decree nisi in London on the ground of Colman's misconduct in Paris,[41] which was made absolute on 18 February 1935.

She checked into San Ysidro Ranch, the resort hotel Colman had bought with Al Weingand in the spring of 1935 and where he often spent the weekends.

[43] In 1939, half a year after Colman's marriage to Benita Hume, she opened Thelma's Fish Net Shoppe at 496 Coast Boulevard South (now North Pacific Coast Highway) in Laguna Beach and advertised herself as „The Original Mrs. Ronald Colman“, using notepaper printed with „Mrs.

In November 1927 she was arrested in Chicago when she appropriated an unattended taxi and set it on fire by forgetting to release the handbrake.

[49] After the separation from Colman in 1924, she lived in London, Paris, Italy, Switzerland and for some years in the south of France where she had a villa.

[51] At about the same time she settled in Port Macquarie in New South Wales, Australia, first in Flynn's Beach[52] and then in Tacking Point.

[53] Thelma Victoria Maud Colman died at Hastings District Hospital at Port Macquarie on 29 June 1966.