Aaliyah (16 January 1979–25 August 2001), singer, actress, and model, was born Aaliyah Dana Haughton to Michael Haughton, a warehouse worker, and Diane Haughton in Brooklyn, New York. For this second child, the Haughtons chose an Arabic first name that meant “the highest, most exalted one, the best.”...
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Aaliyah (16 January 1979–25 August 2001), singer, actress, and model
Margena A. Christian
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Adams, Maude (1872-1953), actress
Tracy C. Davis
Adams, Maude (11 November 1872–17 July 1953), actress, was born Maude Ewing Kiskadden in Salt Lake City, Utah, the daughter of James Henry Kiskadden, a banker, and Asenath Ann Adams, an actress. Adams’s mother was raised a Mormon but married outside the church. Adams, the only surviving child, was introduced to an audience at nine months and took her first speaking role at the age of five. She used her mother’s maiden name from the outset of her career. She appeared frequently in stock companies with her mother, first in Salt Lake City, then in 1874 in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1875 in San Francisco, and on tours throughout the West. Reports on Adams’s schooling vary, the longest estimate being that she studied from the age of six to sixteen. According to Phyllis Robbins’s biography (informed by Adams’s mother and various other family members and corrected in manuscript by Adams), she had only intermittent schooling before spending her tenth and eleventh years at the Salt Lake City Collegiate Institute under her maternal grandmother’s protection; formal tutoring ended when her father died and Adams was summoned to San Francisco to join her mother. They toured together until 1888, when Adams received her first engagement in a resident New York company. Several years of stock with E. H. Sothern followed before Adams made a success in 1892 in ...
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Adams, Maude (1872-1953)
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Adler, Sara (1860?–28 April 1953), actress
Edna Nahshon
Adler, Sara (1860?–28 April 1953), actress, was born in Odessa, Ukraine, the daughter of Ellye Levitzky and Pessye (maiden name unknown), merchants. She attended a Russian school, where she made her dramatic debut at age eight in the role of Emilia in Schiller’s ...
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Adler, Stella (1901-1992), actress and acting teacher
Mark Fearnow
Adler, Stella (10 February 1901–21 December 1992), actress and acting teacher, was born in New York City, the daughter of Jacob Adler, an actor, and Sara Levitzky Adler, an actress and producer. As part of the first family of the American Yiddish theater, Adler was acting from the age of five. Like her parents and five siblings, she was in constant demand as her parents’ Independent Yiddish Art Company played its ever-expanding repertory to packed houses on the city’s Lower East Side. The child-actor’s schedule allowed little time for formal education beyond reading and theatergoing....
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Alexander, Dorothy (1904-1986), dancer, teacher, and artistic director
Doris Hering
Alexander, Dorothy (22 April 1904–17 November 1986), dancer, teacher, and artistic director, was born Dorothea Moses in Atlanta, Georgia, the daughter of Frank Moses, a sales executive, and Cora Mina Thibadeau. Illness first introduced Dorothy to dance. At the age of six she was forced to spend a year immobilized by osteomyelitis. Dance was recommended to accelerate her recuperation, and the remainder of her life was devoted to the art. Every summer during her early adulthood she left Atlanta in search of the best teachers. Her choices were eclectic; they included ...
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Allan, Maud (1873-1956), dancer, choreographer, and actress
Elizabeth Weigand
Allan, Maud (27 August 1873–07 October 1956), dancer, choreographer, and actress, was born Ula Maude Durrant in Toronto, Canada, the daughter of William Allan Durrant, a shoemaker, and Isa Matilda Hutchinson. In the late 1870s the family migrated from Ontario to San Francisco, where Allan grew up and, from an early age, studied piano with several teachers. San Francisco’s thriving theatrical and musical environment in the late 1880s and early 1890s enabled her to see fine performances, including those by some of the best women artists, among them Adele aus der Ohe and Sarah Bernhardt. Allan’s discipline, however, was piano. At age twenty-two, already musically accomplished and very beautiful, she went to Berlin for advanced piano study at the Royal High School for Music then under the direction of Joseph Joachim....
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Allan, Maud (1873-1956)
Maker: Arnold Genthe
In
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Allen, Gracie (1895-1964), actress and comedienne
Barbara W. Grossman
Allen, Gracie (26 July 1895–27 August 1964), actress and comedienne, was born Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen in San Francisco, California, the daughter of George Allen, an Irish clog and minstrel dancer, and Margaret Darragh. The year of her birth has been cited as late as 1906, but the 1900 U.S. Census confirms the 1895 date. Gracie was the family’s fifth child and fourth daughter. Sometime after 1900 Allen’s father deserted the family, and her mother married Edward Pidgeon, a San Francisco police captain....
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Allen, Viola (1867-1948), actress
Mary C. Kalfatovic
Allen, Viola (27 October 1867–09 May 1948), actress, was born Viola Emily Allen in Huntsville, Alabama, the daughter of Charles Leslie Allen, a well-known character actor (who was on tour in the South, hence his daughter’s Alabama birthplace), and Sarah Jane Lyon, an actress. She attended schools in Boston, Toronto, and New York before commencing an acting career at age fourteen. Remarkably, Allen’s professional stage debut came in the form of a starring role in a Broadway production when in 1882 she replaced ...
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Allyson, June (1917-2006)
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Allyson, June (1917-2006), actress
Bruce J. Evensen
Allyson, June (07 October 1917–08 July 2006), actress, was born Eleanor “Ella” Geisman in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of Robert Geisman, a janitor, and Clara Provost. Ella's father was an alcoholic and took little interest in her. When she was six months old, her parents separated. Mother and daughter moved from their Bronx tenement on 143rd Street to her grandparents' apartment near Pelham Bay. Clara landed a $20-a-week printing job and moved with her daughter to an $18-a-month coldwater flat off Third Avenue. Ella collected firewood and bathed in a washtub. Many moves followed. Often, Ella was shipped off to her grandparents. She felt isolated and abandoned. “You're going to be somebody in this world,” her grandmother consoled her ( ...
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Anderson, Mary (1859-1940), actress
Elizabeth R. Nelson
Anderson, Mary (28 July 1859–29 May 1940), actress, was born Marie Antoinette Henry in Sacramento, California, the daughter of Charles Henry, an English gentleman, and Antonia Leugers, a Philadelphian of German descent. While Anderson was an infant, she moved with her family to Louisville, Kentucky, where her uncle, Father Anthony Müller, a Franciscan, lived. Her father enlisted as an officer in the Confederate army and rose to the rank of general before he was killed near Mobile, Alabama, in 1863. Four years later her mother married Dr. Hamilton Griffin....
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Andrews, Dana (1909-1992), actor
Ann T. Keene
Andrews, Dana (01 January 1909–17 December 1992), actor, was born Carver Dana Andrews in Collins, Mississippi, to Charles Forrest Andrews, a Baptist minister, and Annis Speed. During his years as a Hollywood star, studio publicists listed his birth date as 1912. The third of nine children, he was named after professors his father had studied under at a theological seminary and was known as Dana. One of his brothers also became an performing under the name Steve Forrest....
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Angelou, Maya (4 Apr. 1928–28 May 2014), writer, performer, and activist
Jacqueline S. Thursby
Angelou, Maya (4 Apr. 1928–28 May 2014), writer, performer, and activist, was born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, the second child of Bailey Johnson, Sr., a doorman and Navy dietitian, and Vivian Baxter, a registered nurse, cocktail hostess, and Merchant Marine. Her brother, Bailey, Jr., nicknamed her Maya, and the name stuck. After their parents’ divorce, the two young children were sent alone on a train from San Francisco to Stamps, Arkansas, to be met and raised by their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, and their father’s brother, Uncle Willie, who was disabled. Grandmother Henderson had managed to build and own a general store with living quarters in the back, and it was also a safe black community gathering place in the segregated town. Uncle Willie provided a steady stream of good reading and high scholastic expectations, and their grandmother, “Momma,” taught them no-nonsense life skills, took them to church, and loved them....
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Angelou, Maya (4 April 1928–28 May 2014)
Maker: Brigitte Lacombe
Portrait of Maya Angelou, 1987, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, © Brigitte Lacombe
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, © Brigitte Lacombe
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Anglin, Margaret (1876-1958), actress
Elizabeth R. Nelson
Anglin, Margaret (03 April 1876–07 January 1958), actress, was born Mary Margaret Anglin in Ottawa, Canada, the daughter of Timothy Warren Anglin, Speaker of the House of Commons, and Ellen A. McTavish. Born a Roman Catholic, she was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Montreal until she left school at fifteen to pursue a career as a concert reader. Despite her father’s disapproval, her mother supported her choice and enabled Margaret to go to New York to study elocution when she was seventeen....
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Anglin, Margaret (1876-1958)
Maker: Arnold Genthe
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Arden, Eve (30 April 1912?–12 November 1990), stage, film, radio, and television actress
James Van Dyck Card
Arden, Eve (30 April 1912?–12 November 1990), stage, film, radio, and television actress, was born Eunice Quedens in Mill Valley, California, the daughter of Lucille Frank. Her parents divorced when she was two because of her father’s inveterate gambling. As a single parent, her mother made a living as a milliner, work that accounts in part for the headpieces Arden was noted for in her Hollywood days. She was raised by her mother in San Francisco and by her aunt in Mill Valley, inland from Sausalito. Success in a high school play led her to begin acting professionally at age sixteen with the Henry Duffy company in San Francisco. Soon after, she toured West Coast resorts and hotels (“the citrus circuit”) with the Bandbox Repertory Theater, a “superstock” company. Both allowed her to develop her acting skills. An appearance in a Leonard Silman revue, ...