 After first finding work as a journalist, Dudley Murphy began making films in the early 1920s.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.