Before Hollywood Had Rules: Iowa Actress Rita Bell's Wild Moment in Film

Rita Bell was born Marguerite Hughes Bell in 1893, back when the Midwest still believed it could raise children who would never leave. Iowa City was orderly and calm, a place that expected people to fit. Bell didn’t.

She sang her first part in an amateur performance in Iowa City while she was still a little girl, dressed in pinafores and wearing pigtails, standing on a small local stage and learning what it felt like to be seen.

 

She changed her name to Rita Bell because the old name belonged to classrooms and expectations. The new one fit on a program and was easy to remember.

 

This wasn’t a movie story. Despite later guesswork, Rita Bell never worked in silent films. Her career lived where voices mattered and mistakes were public—stages and music halls, where you either held the room or you didn’t.

 

By the early 1920s, she was working professionally. In 1922, she played the ingenue role in The Spice of Life, produced by John Murray Anderson. The role demanded charm without softness and confidence without arrogance.

In September 1923, Bell spoke to reporters from the Des Moines Register and gave blunt advice.

 

“If you want to be a successful actress, go to college,” she said. “If you can tell a theatrical manager, you have a bachelor of arts degree from a college or university of high standards, you go up in his estimation 9 degrees, yes almost 10.”

 

It wasn’t romantic. It was practical. Bell had learned that preparation mattered and education bought credibility in a business that rarely admitted it valued either.

 

She went further, listing what the stage actually required: foreign languages, music, dancing. Not decoration. Equipment. Without them, you were guessing. Bell got her training at the University of Iowa before leaving Iowa City behind.

 

Musical theater and revue work meant constant movement. No guarantees. No safety net. Just strange cities and the need to be good again the next night. Bell adapted. You stayed flexible, or you disappeared.

 

She took her act overseas when American performers were still a novelty, working across Europe and Africa. These weren’t leisurely tours. They were long, grinding runs that rewarded stamina. Bell kept going.

 

Radio widened the field. She adjusted and sang into microphones, reaching audiences she would never see. It paid the bills and kept her working as the business shifted under her feet.

 

She also wrote songs. That gave her some control in an industry that treated performers as interchangeable. Sometimes the illusion of control was enough.

 

Eventually, the work slowed. Careers like hers rarely ended cleanly. They faded. No final bow. Bell lived long enough to see the entertainment world reshape itself into something barely recognizable. She died in 1992.