Is Margot Robbie’s character Nellie LaRoy in ‘Babylon’ based on a real person?
Damien Chazelle’s ode to early Hollywood hedonism, Babylon, was one of the biggest box-office bombs in recent memory. Its disastrous balance sheet seemed oddly befitting a story of decadent decay and characters in an unchecked downward spiral. No character represents the downfall of the silent era more than Nellie LaRoy, played by Margot Robbie.
LaRoy is a destitute wanderer from the East Coast who envisions herself as a starlet and quickly blags her way into the movie industry. As her star rises, her life grows increasingly out of control, she accumulates huge gambling debts, and has to contend with her own parents, who are institutionalised and addicted to alcohol.
When talkies arrive, Nellie’s onscreen schtick no longer works, and her career falters. Without money coming in and with her debts still unpaid, she runs into trouble with a gangster before disappearing altogether after agreeing to run away to Mexico with her oldest friend Manny. It’s then revealed that she’s died of a drug overdose, aged just 34.
This tragic tale has its roots in the fates of real silent-era stars of the 1920s. There could be several on which Chazelle based his writing on LaRoy’s part, but Robbie has claimed there’s one in particular from whom she drew inspiration.
Whose life did Robbie base her performance on?
At the time of Babylon’s release in 2022, Robbie said in the production notes for the movie that Clara Bow was the actor whose story she researched to bring Nellie LaRoy to life. For her, it was Bow’s upbringing that chimed with the character’s backstory. “Clara Bow had probably the worst childhood of anyone I’ve ever heard of,” she said. “Clara’s parents never got a birth certificate for her because they had already lost two children, and they felt certain she would never make it past her childhood.”
The early Hollywood star grew up in poverty, moving from address to address as her father struggled to find work and taking care of her sick mother. Her mother held a knife to her throat when she was 16 before being committed to a mental asylum. It’s speculated that she was raped by her father at the same age. “When I read that, the character of Nellie really started to make sense to me,” Robbie explained. “I could imagine she always felt that every day she was on the planet she was on borrowed time, so she was going for broke every single day.”
Chazelle’s characterisation of LaRoy as a poverty-stricken young woman with horrific childhood traumas whose only way out is acting reflects Bow’s reality to some extent. LaRoy’s mother is also put away in a sanatorium, and she herself suffers from breakdowns, clinical depression and suicidal tendencies, just as Bow did. “All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing,” Bow once said of her own cinematic characters, “There’s a feeling of tragedy underneath, she’s unhappy and disillusioned, and that’s what people sense.”
Nevertheless, Clara Bow didn’t overdose on drugs in her thirties. Instead, that was the fate of other silent-era stars, Jeanne Eagels and Alma Rubens. Rubens was caught trying to flee California via the Mexican border, too, like Manny tries to do with LaRoy at the climax of Babylon.
Overall, Nellie LaRoy is a messy composite character of various life stories from the first great era of Hollywood filmmaking. It’s just a shame that Babylon as a whole fails to render in full the complexities of the age in its sprawling three hours of screen time. The ambitious character study it aims for with LaRoy is shrouded in superficial set-pieces and wildly meandering plotlines.
