Laura Keene

Laura Keene

Laura Keene (20 July 1826 – November 4, 1873) was an American actress and manager, whose real name was Mary Frances Moss. She was a niece of the British actress Elizabeth Yates. Her parents were Jane Moss and Tomas King. In her twenty-year stage career, she became known as the first powerful female manager in New York.^[1]

She was born in Winchester, England. She married, in 1844, Henry Wellington Taylor, by whom she had two children, Emma Elija and Clara Stella, before her husband abandoned the family. Her second husband was John Lutz.

Entrepreneurial theatre manager and actress

In 1851, in London, she was playing Pauline in The Lady of Lyons. She made her first appearance in New York on September 20, 1852, on her way to Australia. She returned in 1855 and managed her newly named Laura Keene's Variety House (later more popularly known as The Winter Garden Theatre) until 1857, followed by her own theatre, Laura Keene's Theatre until 1863.^[2]

Stage entertainment turned over quickly in that era, with few productions exceeding a dozen performances, but Keene bucked those odds. An 1857 show called "The Elves" ran for a record 50 performances. Moreover, 1860 was to prove itself an important year for her theater and American drama as well. On March 29, she premiered Dion Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn, which ran for six weeks until the end of the season on May 12; the highlight of this play was the creation of an ocean island on stage in a scene which culminated with the hero diving into the ocean to save the colleen bawn Eily O'Connor. (Betting on the play's success, Boucicault took The Colleen Bawn to London, where it opened on September 10, 1860 and ran for 230 performances, becoming the first long run in the history of English theater.) When Keene reopened her theater later in 1860, she premiered the musical "Seven Sisters," which featured extravagant sets and ran for 253 performances, an astonishing total for the time.^[3]

First producer and star of Our American Cousin

In 1858, Our American Cousin debuted in Laura Keene's Theater. It was her company that was playing at Ford's Theatre, Washington, on the night of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. By some accounts, Keene entered the presidential box at Ford's Theatre after the President was shot and cradled the wounded President's head in her lap.^{[citation needed]}

Legacy

Keene was a successful melodramatic actress, and an admirable manager. For most of the last 10 years of her career, she continued to direct her traveling company. Although Keene will forever be associated with Our American Cousin the night that President Lincoln was assassinated, she also played a significant role in the evolution of the actress as theatre manager in the history of American theatre.^[2] [1]

Keene died of tuberculosis at the age of 47 at Montclair, New Jersey. She is buried in Brooklyn NY's Green-Wood Cemetery.

References

Publications

• Creahan. The Life of Laura Keene (Philadelphia, 1897).
• Henneke, Ben Graf, Laura Keene: a Biography (Council Oak Books, 1990), ISBN 9780933031319.
• Vernanne, Bryan. Laura Keene: A British Actress on the American Stage, 1826-1873 (McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997).
• Winter, William. Old Friends; Being Literary Recollections of Other Days. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1909.