Miss Keane was born in Michigan and moved to London in 1907 to continue her career. She acted a part in Shakespeare only once: she played Juliet in 1919 at the Lyric Theatre in London. The production was a good one with Dame Ellen Terry as the Nurse and Basil Sydney as Romeo; the play had a run of seventy-three performances, but Miss Keane had no need to depend on Shakespeare for a living and several smash hits kept her quite busy. She married Syndey in 1918, only to divorce in 1925.

When Keane played Margherita Cavallini in Edward Sheldon’s play Romance, she was instantly elevated to stardom. When she took Romance to London in 1915, the play ran for an astounding 1,049 performances. The story is a fairly simple one. Thomas Armstrong (played by Owen Nares) is first the rector of St. Giles in New York. Forty years later, when he is Bishop, he looks back upon his love for the opera singer, Mme. Cavallini. The audiences seemed never to tire of this romantic play nor Miss Keane’s performance. It was revived in 1921, 1926, and 1927.

Sarah Frances Frost (Marlowe’s birth name) was born in England and came to the United States as a child in 1870. Her first stage appearance was in 1878 in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H. M. S. Pinafore. She was always popular with her audiences, and over the years became famous for her roles as Juliet, Viola, Rosalind, Beatrice, and Portia. After a stressful and failed marriage to and divorce from the ambitious actor Robert Taber, in 1904 Marlowe began performing with her second husband-to-be, E. H. Sothern, himself a distinguished Shakespearean. Although Marlowe was already a Broadway star in her own right, and was considered to be the best actress in the country, their first success as a team was in Romeo & Juliet in 1904. Seven years later, they married.

In 1907 she returned with her husband to England and as a member of Sothern’s company excelled in various plays in the company’s Shakespeare repertory. However, much of their major success was on Broadway. For a short time, they introduced Shakespeare to a much wider audience by performing many of his works at affordable prices at the Academy of Music in New York. She and her husband made eleven phonograph recordings of Shakespeare scenes between 1920 and 1921. She performed chiefly in the plays of Shakespeare and worked almost constant until her retirement in 1924. Later in life, George Washington University and Columbia University each conferred upon her honorary doctorate degrees. During her own lifetime, she was the subject of two biographies, one by a John D. Barry (1899) and another by Charles Edward Russell (1926), one of the founders of the NAACP.

Marlowe became somewhat of a recluse after Sothern died in 1933. They had no children, and she passed away in 1950 at the age of eighty-five.

From around 1895 owned and lived at the mansion at 337 Riverside Drive, New York City. Marlowe financed the townhome with the profits from her many Broadway successes, including both Shakespeare roles and her acclaimed role as Mary Tudor in Paul Kester’s adaptation of When Knighthood Was In Flower.

Marlowe’s stage prowess was well-acknowledged and long-lived. One reporter, in a 1903 edition of The New York Sun, noted of Marlowe: “There is not a woman player in America or in England that is—attractively considered—fit to unlace her shoe.” 

Shakespeare & the Players speculates that Harris was a member of the famous acting family, Glossop Harris, derived from Joseph Glossop, first manager of what is now known as the Old Vic.

Genevieve Hamper, an American actress, was married to Robert B. Mantell (she was thirty-four years his junior) and played in his company, often acting alongside him in major roles, until his death in 1928. She married another actor, John Alexander, and seems to have left the stage permanently for a career in Hollywood where she made several films. Her son, Robert Mantell, Jr., also an actor, committed suicide in 1933.

Evelyn Millard, a popular stage “beauty,” made her first appearance in 1891 as a walk-on at the Haymarket Theatre. Her first major parts came when she joined Sarah Thorne at the Theatre Royal in Margate; she played, among other roles, Juliet and then Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. When she joined the company of Sir Beerbohm Tree in 1897 she was given the role of Portia in Julius Caesar.

Between 1903 and 1916, she played in several more Shakespeare productions: Jessica in The Merchant of Venice (1903), Juliet in 1905, and Desdemona in Lewis Waller‘s production of Othello in 1906. After forming her own company in 1908 she played Ophelia in Hamlet (1910) and Olivia in Twelfth Night in 1912 with Harley Granville Barker at the Savoy Theatre. Her last recorded Shakespeare role was as Calpurnia in Julius Caesar during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration in 1916.

Notably, Millard is known for creating the role of Cecily Cardew in the 1895 premiere of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. A year later, she performed in a Royal Command Performance for Queen Victoria. After retiring from the stage, she died in Kensington, at her home, in 1941 at the age of seventy.

A cousin of actress Julia Neilson, Nora Kerin’s stage debut was in 1899. She first appeared in Shakespeare at the Queen’s Theatre, Manchester, as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Anne Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Rosalind in As You Like It. She toured Australia in 1903 playing various parts in the Shakespeare repertory of George Alexander’s company. When she returned to England in 1904, she appeared as Miranda in a production of The Tempest at His Majesty’s Theatre. this production is represented in one of the cards below. Most the cards here depict her in the role of Juliet in Matheson Lang‘s production of Romeo & Juliet which opened at the Lyceum Theatre, London, on March 14, 1908, and ran for over two months. Her favorite part, as reported in Who Was Who in the Theatre, was Rosalind.

Here is part of a review of her performance in Romeo & Juliet from The Daily Mail, London, March 16 1908:

“Oh, Juliet! Juliet, wherefore art thou Juliet?” This is, of course, an inversion and a parody; but, seriously, the Juliet of Miss Nora Kerin cannot be taken so. She declaims in the conventional old-fashioned style. She somehow destroys—on the stage—her own personality, and instead of looking the pink of charm and youth (as she is when “taking a call”) she manages to conceal both. Many of her lines were badly spoken, falsely intonated and punctuated. She had moments—melodramatic outbursts—but she is not the personality—she has not the witching simplicity of the real Juliet.

Mr. Matheson Lang as Romeo was at times quite admirable. He looks a Romeo; handsome, virile, impetuous, perfervid. His voice is good, he spoke his lines with intelligence and charm. By and by he will improve; put more power, eloquence, freedom into his interpretation; be quieter and (I hope) not always enter and quit the scene on the run. But he gave a fine performance and was greatly appreciated.

Mr. Eric Mayne played with fine brio as Mercutio, and brought off one or two very successful things, notably a realistic death scene. Miss Blanche Stanley played the Nurse up to the full limit of comedy, and “got her laughter right enough,” and Mr. Halliwell Hobbes did the same with Tybalt.

One thing remains to be said. The fights are almost Sicilian in their realism. On the whole, Romeo up to date is quite a good thing.

Elder sister of actor Dennis Neilson-Terry. Daughter of famous Shakespearean actors Julia Neilson and Fred Terry. Niece of Dame Ellen Terry.

Born in London in 1892, Phyllis was in good company. She studied in Paris and then at the Royal Academy of Music to be a singer. She made her first stage appearance in 1909 while on tour with her parent’s company in Blackpool. A few times, she would fill in for her mother when the latter would fall ill. Her acclaim in Shakespeare came early on with a 1910 production of Twelfth Night with Sir Beerbohm Tree‘s company at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Phyllis played the leading role of Viola, while Tree played Malvolio and her father, Fred, as Viola’s twin brother Sebastian. As such, Phyllis replaced Ellen in the role she would play opposite her brother.

For the next four years, she went on to play many of Shakespeare’s leading ladies, much in the legendary (and expected) Terry/Neilson tradition: Desdemona (Othello), Rosalind (As You Like It), Portia (The Merchant of Venice), Juliet. Many of the cards here represent her performances as Juliet as well as other coveted roles. She was lauded extensively for her portrayals. Likewise, in the 1930s, Phyllis played the roles of Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine in Macbeth and Henry VIII, respectively, at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford.

Legend has it that Phyllis, in 1922, gave her young cousin John Gielgud his first ever paid role in The Wheel by J. B. Fagan. She died in London at age eighty-four after having been married twice.

Postcards of Juliet

Playing first in amateur productions, Margaret Halstan became a professional actress in 1895 at the Haymarket Theatre in a walk-on part in Trilby. Her first part in Shakespeare was a small one; she was the Player Queen Hamlet with Herbert Beerbohm Tree‘s production of the play. In 1897, she played Octavia in Antony & Cleopatra and then that same year appeared as Bianca in an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew entitled Katherine and Petruchio.

In 1900, she joined Frank Benson‘s company where she had ample opportunity to play Shakespeare; she appeared as Portia (The Merchant of Venice), Lady Anne (Richard III), Hero (Much Ado), and Volumnia (Coriolanus). After touring with George Alexander’s group, she joined Beerbohm’s Shakespearean Company in 1904, and after that played many more Shakespeare parts: Anne Page, Calpurnia (Julius Caesar), Olivia (in 1906 and 1910), Juliet, Desdemona, and Rosalind (1908 and 1916). She played in Stratford in April 1909 as Imogen and Ophelia and Juliet again in 1913. Her role as Rosalind in 1916 may have been her last Shakespeare performance. Her early training as an actress was, however, primarily in Shakespeare’s best female roles.

She played dozens of parts in popular plays during her long career, and she was busy with films as well. Between 1917 and 1957 she played in fifteen films. The most notable of her parts was one she played several times on the London stage; she played Aunt Lydia in George O’Ferrall’s 1952 film version of The Holly and the Ivy, a sentimental but poignant story of a Christmas gathering of a family.