Heavyset American actress and movie theater operator. Together with Laura Peralta, another Our Gang mother (and their Spanish tutor), she co-owned the noted Meralta movie theater in Culver City, California.
She played clarinet in the Women's Symphony Orchestra of Los Angeles, where Peralta played saxophone. They teamed and toured in vaudeville as a saxophone-comedy act; the large Pearl and the small Laura were respectively billed as "Ella Fant and Miss Kito." After two years on the road, they returned to Los Angeles and opened their first movie theater, the original Meralta (a portmanteau of their surnames), in East L.A.'s Boyle Heights neighborhood in 1917; they moved operations to Culver City in 1919. In 1924, they opened the "classic" Meralta theater in Culver City; a third Meralta opened in Downey, California in 1926. Merrill remained in charge of the Culver City Meralta (whose run was interrupted for two years by a 1943 fire) with Peralta, living in an apartment above the theater, until her passing at Santa Monica Hospital in 1961 after a long illness. She is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City.
She later gave her year of birth as 1890, but earlier records such as the 1900 Census point to it actually being two years earlier.
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