Thelma Furness, Viscountess Furness

Her maternal grandfather was a Union general, Hugh Judson Kilpatrick (1836–1881), who was also U.S. minister to Chile, and through her maternal grandmother Luisa Fernandez de Valdivieso, who was a niece of Crescente Errázuriz Valdivieso, Archbishop of Santiago, she reportedly was a descendant of Spain's royal house of Navarre.

Thelma Morgan had two sisters: Gloria (her identical twin, the mother of Gloria Vanderbilt, the fashion designer and artist and mother of news anchor Anderson Cooper) and Laura Consuelo Morgan (aka Tamar), who was married to Count Jean de Maupas du Juglart, a French nobleman; to Benjamin Thaw, Jr. of Pittsburgh; and to Alfons B. Landa, president of Colonial Airlines and vice-chairman of the finance committee of the Democratic National Committee in 1948. She also had a brother, Harry Hays Morgan, Jr., who became a minor Hollywood actor in such films as "Abie's Irish Rose" (1946), "Joan of Arc" (1948), and others. Her half-siblings, from her father's first marriage, were Constance and Gladys Morgan. Read Less

Reacting to the Prince's coldness later that year she threw herself into a short-lived affair with Prince Aly Khan.

For a very brief time, she was a motion picture producer and actress, after founding Thelma Morgan Pictures at the age of 17 in 1923. As she told Time magazine, "I am incorporating the Thelma Morgan Pictures, Inc., with $100,000 capital and will produce big, sane, and sound 'specials.' I will be my own star. Hitherto, my chief experience has been in Junior League shows." Her first starring role, in 1923, was the lead in a film Aphrodite, produced by her own company and filmed at Vitagraph Studios.

She described her leading role in Aphrodite to The New York Times as that of "an American girl, brought up under the sinister influence of an old Egyptian woman." She also had small parts in the films Enemies of Women (1923), a William Randolph Hearst production whose cast included Lionel Barrymore and Clara Bow, So This Is Marriage? (1924), and Any Woman (1925). Read Less