author

Meg Gehrts

1891–1966

An early 20th-century actress and traveler, she is best remembered for a vivid 1915 memoir about making films in West Africa under demanding and unusual conditions. Her writing offers a rare firsthand glimpse of silent-era filmmaking, colonial travel, and adventure on the edge of the camera’s early frontier.

1 Audiobook

A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland The adventures, observations & experiences of a cinematograph actress in West African forests whilst collecting films depicting native life and when posing as the white woman in Anglo-African cinematograph dramas

A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland The adventures, observations & experiences of a cinematograph actress in West African forests whilst collecting films depicting native life and when posing as the white woman in Anglo-African cinematograph dramas

by Meg Gehrts

About the author

Meg Gehrts was an actress and author best known for A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland (1915). In that book, published as by “Miss M. Gehrts,” she recounts her experiences in West Africa while working on cinematograph productions with Major Hans Schomburgk.

Her memoir stands out because it combines travel writing, performance, and early film history. It describes the practical hardships of location shooting as well as the excitement of helping create dramatic scenes far from the studio world that would later define cinema.

Although detailed biographical information about her is not easy to confirm from the sources found here, her book has remained available through Project Gutenberg and continues to interest readers drawn to adventure narratives, women’s travel writing, and the beginnings of documentary and expedition filmmaking.