Alma Rubens rose to stardom after her role opposite Douglas Fairbanks in the 1916 film The Half-Breed. She made a run of pictures for Triangle Studios before signing with William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions. Hearst had his publicity team tout Alma as a direct descendant of Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. (She was not.)
Her first three films for Cosmopolitan were hits. But, Alma developed an addiction to heroin. Her drug use made her difficult to work with and unreliable on the set. She managed to complete three more pictures before Hearst let her out of her contract in 1922.
By the late 1920s, Alma’s drug use increased and was out of control. She was in and out of sanitariums. She escaped from a few and attempted to stab a physician at one. But, by 1930, she announced she had kicked her drug habit. She was appearing in a play, but two weeks later, she was arrested for trying to smuggle morphine and cocaine into Mexico. Shortly after her release from jail, she contracted pneumonia and bronchitis and fell into a coma. Alma never regained consciousness. She died on January 21, 1931, just a few days after her 33rd birthday.