Actress, Writer. She gained stardom during the American Silent movie era. Born June Beulah Hughes, she began her career as a stage actor and scriptwriter with several films starting in 1917. A short, thickset, rather plain-looking woman with frizzy hair, she used her stepfather's surname of Mathis. After being a fairly successful stage actor, she took a writing course in New York City to support her career as a screenwriter. She was hired by Metro Pictures in 1918 to write scenarios for films. She successfully adapted Vicente Blasco Ibanez's novel, "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," into a film version starring Rudolph Valentino, the dark and handsome actor that she discovered in an earlier film, "Eyes of Youth". She staked her reputation at Metro by casting Valentino as the lead with great success. Her other credits include "Blood and Sand" and "The Young Rajah" both in 1922 and "The Sheik" in 1921 with Valentino. To the disappointment of many film archivists of today, she was one of the persons who helped cut the 10-hour long epic film "Greed" to a two-hour movie. In December of 1924 she married Sylvano Balboni, a handsome Italian cameraman, hence his surname is on her crypt marker. In 1925 she wrote the screenplay for the silent "Ben-Hur." She helped to establish the importance of a script in American silent films. While attending a play at the New York Theater with her grandmother, her life came to a tragic end dying from a heart attack. Her obituary was on the front page of the "New York Times." Her contributions to Hollywood are legendary and she garnered great respect as she was one of the highest paid employees in the industry, receiving between $750 to $1,000 per week. She was once called the most powerful woman in Hollywood's pioneering film industry and known to have meticulously written or co-written the screenplays of one hundred and fourteen produced features. In 1926 she was voted the most important woman screenwriter in Hollywood by the American Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Science. In 2009 the her first in-depth biography was published by Hala Pickford in "Rudolph Valentino: A Wife's Memories of an Icon." Sources state that she donated her pre-need crypt for Valentino's last resting place and later, she was entombed to the left of him. Like him, she was a spiritualist.