Doris Keane

Keane, Doris (1881–1945), actress. One of many performers remembered for a single role, this piquant beauty was born in Michigan and educated largely in Europe. She apparently also spent some time at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and with the school associated with the Empire Theatre. Keane's first professional assignment was a small role in Whitewashing Julia (1903). She then rose rapidly to such leading roles as the neglected wife Joan Thornton in Clyde Fitch's The Happy Marriage (1909), the loyal wife Bess Marks in The Lights o' London (1911), and the vulgar music‐hall performer Mimi in the The Affairs of Anatol (1912). In 1913 she first appeared as Margherita Cavallini, the great opera star who forsakes her young clergyman lover rather than ruin his career, in Edward Sheldon's Romance. Walter Prichard Eaton wrote of her in this part, “Miss Keane . . . has dark, magnetic eyes, a curious mouth that is extremely mobile and can suggest either impish glee or profound sorrow very easily . . . and a general attractiveness of face and figure which arrests our attention. Having arrested our attention, we soon realize other features of her personality, notably her humor, not without its capacity for a sarcastic edge, her sensitiveness to impressions, her alert mind. We sense her as rather an unusual person.” She played Cavallini uninterruptedly in America and Europe for the next five years and returned to the role in regular revivals until the late 1920s. Although Keane afterward appeared as the heroine in several other plays, among them a 1919 revival of Romeo and Juliet and Eugene O'Neill's failed Welded (1924), her only other success was as Catherine the Great in Czarina (1922), a European play especially revised for her by Sheldon.