Merely Mary Ann is a romantic comedy drama film starring Janet Gaynor

Janet Gaynor

Janet Gaynor was an American actress and painter.One of the most popular actresses of the silent film era, in 1928 Gaynor became the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in three films: Seventh Heaven , Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and Street Angel...

 and Charles Farrell

Charles Farrell

Charles Farrell was an American film actor of the 1920s silent era and into the 1930s, and later a television actor...

. Gaynor and Farrell made almost a dozen films together, including Frank Borzage

Frank Borzage

Frank Borzage was an American film director and actor.-Biography:Frank Borzage's father, Luigi Borzaga, was born in Ronzone, in 1859. As a stonemason, he sometimes worked in Switzerland; he met his future wife, Maria Ruegg , where she worked in a silk factory...

's classics Seventh Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928), and Lucky Star (1929); Gaynor won the first Academy Award for Best Actress

Academy Award for Best Actress

Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry...

 for the first two and F. W. Murnau's Sunrise

Sunrise (film)

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, also known as Sunrise, is a 1927 American silent film directed by German film director F. W. Murnau. The story was adapted by Carl Mayer from the short story "Die Reise nach Tilsit" by Hermann Sudermann.Sunrise won an Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Production...

. The film, involving an orphan (Gaynor) and a flat-broke composer (Farrell), was written by Jules Furthman

Jules Furthman

Jules Furthman was a magazine and newspaper writer before working as a screenwriter.Born in Chicago, Illinois, during World War I he wrote under the name "Stephen Fox." Furthman wrote screenplays for a number of important or popular films, including: The Docks of New York , Thunderbolt , Merely...

 from Israel Zangwill

Israel Zangwill

Israel Zangwill was a British humorist and writer.-Biography:Zangwill was born in London on January 21, 1864 in a family of Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia, to Moses Zangwill from what is now Latvia and Ellen Hannah Marks Zangwill from what is now Poland. He dedicated his life to championing...

's play and directed by Henry King

Henry King (director)

Henry King was an American film director.Before coming to film, King worked as an actor in various repertoire theatres, and first started to take small film roles in 1912. He directed for the first time in 1915, and grew to become one of the most commercially successful Hollywood directors of the...

.

Cast

• Janet Gaynor
  Janet Gaynor
  Janet Gaynor was an American actress and painter.One of the most popular actresses of the silent film era, in 1928 Gaynor became the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in three films: Seventh Heaven , Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and Street Angel...
  
   as Mary Ann
• Charles Farrell
  Charles Farrell
  Charles Farrell was an American film actor of the 1920s silent era and into the 1930s, and later a television actor...
  
   as John Lonsdale
• Beryl Mercer
  Beryl Mercer
  Beryl Mercer was a Spanish-born American-based actress of the 1920s and 1930s.Born to British parents in Seville, Beryl Mercer was best-known for her motherly roles in film and regularly appeared as a grandmother or cook or maid in some high profile films...
  
   as Mrs. Leadbatter
• J. M. Kerrigan
  J. M. Kerrigan
  Joseph Michael Kerrigan , better known as J. M. Kerrigan, born in Dublin, Ireland, was an Irish character actor.-Life:Kerrigan worked as a newspaper reporter until 1907 when he joined the famous Abbey Players...
  
  as First Drayman
• Tom Whiteley as Second Drayman
• Lorna Balfour as Lorna Leadbatter
• Arnold Lucy as Vicar Smedge
• G.P. Huntley as Peter Brooke