Dudley Murphy

Dudley Bowles Murphy (July 10, 1897 – February 22, 1968) was an American film director. In his first short film, Soul of the Cypress (1921), a variation on the Orpheus myth, the film's protagonist falls in love with a dryad (a wood nymph whose soul dwells in an ancient tree) and throws himself into the sea to become immortal and spend eternity with her.

Murphy's then-wife Chase Harringdine played the dryad. Murphy followed this with Danse Macabre (1922) featuring Adolph Bolm, Olin Howland, and Ruth Page. Description above from the Wikipedia article Dudley Murphy licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.