Born in Beverly Hills on June 12, 1930, Belinda Vidor was the younger of two daughters of legendary Hollywood “auteur” film director, producer and screenwriter, King Wallis Vidor (1894-1982) and gamine actress and model Olive Eleanor Boardman (1898-1991). As writerLisa Crawford Watson describes Belinda, she was “elegant, willowy, and beautiful, with her mother’s wide-set eyes, lit by her father’s glycerin blue.”“Belinda was just a year old when her parents divorced, and her mother, done with the halcyon days of Hollywood, escaped with her two daughters to France, where she married a French filmmaker and assigned a governess to her children. This launched a peripatetic upbringing for Belinda and Antonia, living between two continents. Belinda ultimately returned to California, where she attended Mills College before transferring to UCLA. There she studied under the now- late artist, professor, and film producer Jan Stussy, earning a degree in art.”After graduation, writes Watson, “Belinda Vidor was invited to dine at the family home of her beau, Dean Jones, where she realized that unlike her own, his parents actually knew his friends and interests and participated in his life. She watched as dinner was served family style, and folks got up from the table to help with the dishes and reach for cookies hidden above the refrigerator. And she wanted that. After she married Jones, they moved to Modesto and had three children. Only then did her mother recognize, ‘I see what you wanted: a classic California home and a conventional family.’ Belinda didn’t understand it at the time, but in retrospect, she knew her mother was right.”Watson goes on to say, “In the early 1970s, after losing her son Kenny in an accident, Vidor chose to reinvent her life without Jones, in Carmel, where her parents had often summered by the sea. When she arrived in town, she saw painters poised at their easels by the bay, cafes where people were leaning into the conversation, and an older woman, wearing a hat and brightly colored socks, walking uptown with her dog. Vidor was only 43 at the time, but she knew, ultimately, she wanted that too.”“What she didn’t realize she also wanted, until she met him, was finding the love of her life. Vidor met Jaquelin Smith Holliday II, who preferred “Jim,” in March 1982, at a book signing for what is still considered a masterful history of the California Gold Rush era: The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience. Born in Indianapolis in 1924, Jim Holliday graduated from Yale in 1948 with a degree in history, his curriculum having been disrupted by WWII, during which he served as a lieutenant in the Navy. A decade later he achieved his doctorate in history from UC Berkeley. He later served as founding director of the Oakland Museum of California and two terms as executive director of the California Historical Society.”Continues Watson, “In July 1982, Belinda Vidor went on her first date with the dashing California historian. Three weeks hence, they exchanged their first ‘I love you,’ as recorded in her diary of significant dates with the man she married on June 11, 1983. Equally scholarly and social, Jim Holliday was, first and foremost, a family man, whose children and stepchildren considered him a mentor, a force, and a wonderful father. Belinda Vidor Holliday said he was her “husband, her champion, her best friend, her dream come true.” The year 1982 also saw the passing of Belinda’s father King Vidor, whose career had spanned from silent films to the sound movie era, bestowing him with highest honors including the Screen Directors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award as well as a special Academy Award as an “incomparable cinematic creator and innovator.”Happily settled with Jim into her classic Carmel cottage “The Sketch Box,” Belinda Vidor Holliday devoted herself full-time to painting. This house was built in 1923 by Michael J. Murphy for one of the Carmel Art Association’s founding members, artist Ada Belle Champlin.Watson recounts, “The property subsequently belonged to renowned CAA Artist Member Frank Montague Moore and his wife, where they had lived until his passing in 1967. Moore had established his art studio in a room where natural lighting came in through a north-facing window. Belinda Vidor planned to do the same. Yet first, she had to secure the property….She knew the house was meant to be hers, even if it was going to take time to convince the seller—three and a half years, to be exact.”Belinda herself was juried into the Carmel Art Association as an Artist Member in 1990. Her cottage was truly a long-established site of creative intention! Wrote one art reviewer, “There is a freshness of vision and boldness of composition in Vidor’s oils, an alliance of shapes and colors that continues to surprise, long after first viewing. …Whatever the subject, from her small plein air landscapes to her large, fanciful abstracts, from her brilliant series of eucalyptus trees to her portraits of large assemblies of people (a symphony orchestra ready to perform on stage, for instance, or a sea of displaced people moving across a desert), and even in her distinctive, late- life succession of floral canvases, her signature style renders dramatic visuals that are clearlyrecognizable.”After Jim passed in 2006, a broken-hearted Belinda turned her attention to family, friends, painting, and her devotion to dogs. As she moved into her senior years, she continued to celebrate life, firmly believing, “If you sit back and complain about being old, that’s when you deteriorate. I don’t dislike where I am; I just need to keep practicing a vital life.” Without the fanfare she had earned but eschewed, Belinda slipped away from her exceptional life at “The Sketch Box” on January 24, 2023, surrounded by family and friends and with Buster, her Parsons Jack Russell rescue dog by her side.