| Frederica Sagor Maas | |
 | |
| Birth: | 6 July 1900 Manhattan, New York, USA |
| Death: | 5 January 2012 La Mesa, California, USA |
| Age: | 111 years, 183 days |
| Country: |  USA
|
| Validated | |
Frederica Alexandrina Sagor Maas (6 July 1900 – 5 January 2012) was an American dramatist and playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, author, and validated supercentenarian.
Biography[]
Frederica Sagor Maas was born in Manhattan, New York, United States, on 6 July 1900 as the daughter of Russian immigrants. Her parents Arnold and Agnessa Zagorsky were Jewish immigrants from Moscow, Russian Empire, and anglicized their surname to Sagor. She studied journalism at Columbia University and held a summer job as a copy- or errand-girl at the New York Globe newspaper. She dropped out before graduation in 1918 and took a job as an assistant story editor at Universal Pictures' New York office at $100 a week. By 1923 Maas was story editor for Universal and head of the department. A year later in 1924, Maas had become dissatisfied with her position and left Universal to move to Hollywood. As an essayist, Maas was best known for a detailed, tell-all memoir of her time spent in early Hollywood. She married Ernest Maas, a screenwriter and producer at Fox Studios, on August 5, 1927. Having had enough "swell fish", Frederica Sagor Maas took a job as a policy typist with an insurance agency in 1950, quickly working her way up to insurance broker. Ernest took up ghost writing professional business articles and freelance story editing. Ernest succumbed to Parkinson's disease in 1986 at age 94.
In 1999, at age 99, and at the urging of film historian Kevin Brownlow, Maas published her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood. The book was well received and is still a standard reference for early Hollywood history.
Frederica Sagor Maas died from natural causes, at the Country Villa nursing facility in La Mesa, California, United States, on 5 January 2012 at the age of 111 years and 183 days. At the time of her death, she was the 44th oldest verified person in the world. She is among supercentenarians known for other reasons than longevity. She was one of the oldest surviving entertainers from the silent film era.
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