1. As a teenager, Mackaill ran away to London to pursue a stage career as an actress. After temporarily relocating to Paris, she met a Broadway stage choreographer who persuaded her to move to New York City where she became involved in the Ziegfeld Follies and befriended future motion picture actresses Marion Davies and Nita Naldi.
2. By 1920, Mackaill had begun making the transition from "Follies Girl" to film actress. That same year she appeared in her first film, the Wilfred Noy-directed mystery, The Face at the Window. In 1921 she appeared opposite Anna May Wong, Noah Beery, and Lon Chaney in the Marshall Neilan-directed drama Bits of Life. In the following years, Mackaill would appear opposite such popular actors as Richard Barthelmess, Rod La Rocque, Colleen Moore, John Barrymore, George O'Brien, Bebe Daniels, Milton Sills and Anna Q. Nilsson.
3. She made a smooth transition to sound with the part-talkie The Barker in 1928 and had continued success in talkies for the next couple of years. Mackaill's film contract at First National Pictures was not renewed upon its expiration in 1931 and Mackaill became a free agent actress. Her most memorable role of this era was the 1932 Columbia Pictures release Love Affair with a young Humphrey Bogart as her leading man. She made several films for MGM, Paramount and Columbia before retiring in 1937 for many years from the industry to care for her aging mother.
4. Dorothy Mackaill occasionally came out of retirement to appear in roles for television, notably in several episodes of the 1960s and 1970s series Hawaii Five-O, which was filmed on location where Mackaill had lived for several decades.
5. In 1926, Mackaill married the successful film director Lothar Mendes, but the union only lasted for two years before ending in divorce. She would marry two more times: from 1931 to 1934 to Neil Miller, and from 1934 to 1938 to Harold Patterson, both of which marriages also ended in divorce. She produced no children in either of the marriages.
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