Fanny Herring

Herring, Fanny (1832–1906), actress. The daughter of popular performers, the tiny, dark‐haired, hoydenish performer was born in London and came to America four years later. As a teenager she moved from theatre to theatre, and it was not until she performed at the Bowery Theatre in the late 1850s that she found her niche. There Herring soon became the darling of the gallery gods, offering them everything from her Ophelia and Juliet to leading roles in such now forgotten pieces as The Female Detective and The Dumb Girl of Genoa. However, her forte was trouser roles, and she won the loudest cheers for characterizations on the order of Mose in A Glance at New York and the title parts of Jack Sheppard and Sinbad the Sailor. By the early 1870s her popularity at the Bowery began to wane, so she often took herself to important vaudeville houses. Herring continued to perform, still frequently playing youthful street urchins, well into the 1890s, when she was billed at once comically and pathetically as “The Bernhardt of the West Side.”