If you wanted to see a performance acted out in the 19th century you had to travel to the theater to do so.
Towards the end of the 19th century the wonder of film made it possible to see someone perform outside of the stage.
In 1889 moving pictures were only a year old.
But those who have only performed on stage and those that would be the earliest movie stars
were both alive and living alongside one another in 1889.
He was, together with his son-in-law Niels W. Gade (February 22, 1817 – December 21, 1890), the leading Danish composer of the 19th century, a period known as the Danish Golden Age. According to Alfred Einstein (December 30, 1880 – February 13, 1952) , he was “the real founder of the Romantic movement in Denmark and even in all Scandinavia”. J.P.E. Hartmann was the third generation of composers in the Danish musical Hartmann family.
In 1889 he was still producing music. But I couldn’t find any of his music from that year so instead here is…
Sophie Keller (1850–1929) and Julius Steenberg in a production of Liden Kirsten from c. 1880.
Liden Kirsten (Little Kirsten), Op. 44, is an opera in two acts with a Danish libretto by Hans Christian Andersen. It premiered on May 12, 1846 at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen but was only a success after being reworked from one to two acts for the 1858–59 season.
She was a British actress from a theatre family in the early and mid-19th century. She was a well-known and popular writer and abolitionist whose published works included plays, poetry, eleven volumes of memoirs, travel writing, and works about the theatre.
She was an English actress renowned for her comedy roles in a career for over fifty years. In later years Mrs Stirling gained a new popularity as the nurse in Irving‘s presentation (1882) of Romeo and Juliet where she was said to “steal the show” from a cast that included Ellen Terry but she returned to the role in 1884 with Mary Anderson; and she was the Martha in Irving’s production of Faust (1885). She died on 28 December 1895, having in the previous year married Sir Charles Hutton Gregory (1817–1898).
She was an English singer and actress, known for her role as Ariel in W. C. Macready‘s production of The Tempest in 1838 and “fairy” burlesques at Covent Garden Theatre. Later, she was known, along with her husband, Thomas German Reed, for establishing and performing in the family-friendly German Reed Entertainments. There, she was a mentor to W. S. Gilbert, and her performances inspired Gilbert to create some of his famous contralto roles.
He was a popular American stage actor originally from Britain, active on the American stage from 1854 until 1905.
The Bonnie Brier Bush was scheduled to play at the Royal Opera House on April 6, 1905. It was advertised as Stoddart’s last appearance in Guelph. No one suspected that it would be his final performance on a stage anywhere.
By that time Stoddart was 79 years old and ready to retire. According to the press, he was the oldest actor on stage. His daughter travelled with the troupe to look after him on his farewell tour. After the show in Guelph, they were to move on to Galt for the next performance.
That night at the Royal, it was clear to the audience that something was wrong with the star. Local journalist Hereward Cockin wrote in his column, “There was something pathetic as well as dramatic in the veteran player’s last appearance … Stoddart was really fighting, inch by inch, his way through the play, and he had what seemed like Death as his opponent all the way through. Is it not admirable to see a man exercise such control over himself that he can rise superior to nature and snap his fingers at the rider of the white horse? I have seen Stoddart play the part four times, and never did he play it better than he did on Thursday night.”
Stoddart courageously finished the Guelph show, but he was unable to go onstage in Galt. He said it was only the second time in his 74 years as an actor that he’d failed to perform.
The newspapers said Stoddart had suffered a “bilious attack,” but it seems he’d actually had a stroke. His right side was paralyzed. Weeks would pass before he was well enough to travel to his home in New Jersey. Major newspapers like the Toronto Globe and the Toronto Star ran regular updates keeping the public informed of his condition.
A scene from “The Bonnie Briar Bush,” which opened at the Grand Opera House, Seattle, Dec. 27, 1903. J.H. Stoddard appears at left. By Joseph Byron – J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs, Public Domain,
He was an American actor. He was the third actor of this name in a family of actors and managers, and one of the most famous 19th century American comedians. Beginning as a young child, he continued as a performer for most of his 76 years. Jefferson was particularly well known for his adaptation and portrayal of Rip Van Winkle on the stage, reprising the role in several silent film adaptations. After 1865, he created no other major role and toured with this play for decades.
It was through his efforts that the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre was commissioned in 1874/5 (opened 1879). The theatre was very badly damaged by fire in 1926, 47 years after its opening.
The first Shakespeare Memorial Theatre of 1879, from an 1890s photochrom. This was gutted by a fire in 1926, and rebuilt and incorporated into the new theatre in 1932. The building has been used by the Swan Theatre since 1986
Harry Payne
(November 25, 1833 – 27 September 1895)
Frederick Payne (January 1841 – 27 February 1880)
They were members of a popular Victorian era of British pantomime entertainers. Fred Payne became known for portraying Harlequin, and Harry became famous as Clown in the Harlequinade that followed Victorian pantomimes. Together, the brothers appeared in Gilbert and Sullivan‘s first collaboration, Thespis, in 1871. Gilbert made references to the brothers in two of his Bab Ballads.
He was an American stage actor and theatrical manager who toured throughout the United States and the major capitals of Europe, performing Shakespearean plays. In 1869, he founded Booth’s Theatre in New York. He is considered by many to be the greatest American actor of the 19th century. However, his achievements are often overshadowed by his relationship with his younger brother, actor John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.
Henry Irving
(February 6, 1838 – October 13, 1905)
He was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility (supervision of sets, lighting, direction, casting, as well as playing the leading roles) for season after season at the West End‘s Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as representative of English classical theatre. In 1895 he became the first actor to be awarded a knighthood, indicating full acceptance into the higher circles of British society.
He was possibly the first person to shoot a moving picture sequence using a single lens camera and a strip of (paper) film. He has been credited as the “Father of Cinematography“,[3] but his work did not influence the commercial development of cinema—owing largely to the events surrounding his 1890 disappearance.
She was a French stage actress who starred in some of the most popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L’Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She played female and male roles, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Rostand called her “the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture”, and Hugo praised her “golden voice”. She made several theatrical tours worldwide and was one of the early prominent actresses to make sound recordings and act in motion pictures.
She is also linked with the success of artist Alphonse Mucha ( July 24, 1860 – July 14, 1939) whose work she helped to publicize. Mucha became one of the more sought-after artists of this period for his Art Nouveau style.
He was a Chinese Peking opera artist who specialized in sheng roles. A disciple of Cheng Changgeng, Tan Xinpei was undoubtedly the most important Peking opera performer of his generation. Some of his audio recordings have survived. He was also the only actor in China’s earliest film Dingjun Mountain (1905).
More than 40 of his family members have, over seven generations, worked as Peking opera performers, including his son Tan Xiaopei, grandson Tan Fuying, great-grandson Tan Yuanshou, and great-great-grandson Tan Xiaozeng.
In the 2000 film Shadow Magic, the character Tan Linmei is clearly based on Tan Xinpei.
He was an American film and stage actor and director of the silent era. Currier appeared in more than 130 films between 1912 and 1928. He also directed 19 films in 1916. He is memorable in the 1925 film Ben-Hur as the Roman Admiral who adopts Judah Ben-Hur (Ramon Novarro) as his son after Ben-Hur saves his life during a battle at sea.
She was an Australian-born American-based actress whose career spanned 58 years, starting in 1883 when she was 25. A major stage actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she is remembered for the dozens of films she appeared in during the 1930s, when she was in her 70s.
Robson was the earliest-born person, and the first Australian to be nominated for an Academy Award (for her leading role in Lady for a Day in 1933).
He was an American vaudeville performer and stage actor who popularized the comical tramp character. After retiring from the stage in the 1910s, he became a prolific art collector and dealer and also painted his own original works.
Decades after his death, art conservators discovered that Bloom was the perpetrator of an art forgery involving an oil portrait that he claimed depicted First LadyMary Todd Lincoln.
Edwina Booth Grossman (December 9, 1861 – December 26, 1938) was an American writer and the daughter of Shakespearean actorEdwin Booth. In 1894, she published the book Edwin Booth: Recollections by His Daughter, Edwina Booth Grossman, and Letters to Her and to His Friends in an effort to protect her father’s legacy after the 1865 assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Grossman’s uncle, John Wilkes Booth.
Mary McVicker Booth, Edwin Booth, and Edwina Booth (right)
They were French manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their Cinématographe motion picture system and the short films they produced between 1895 and 1905, which places them among the earliest filmmakers.
Their screening of a single film on 22 March 1895 for around 200 members of the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale (Society for the Development of the National Industry) in Paris was probably the first presentation of projected film. Their first commercial public screening on 28 December 1895 for around 40 paying visitors and invited relations has traditionally been regarded as the birth of cinema. Either the techniques or the business models of earlier filmmakers proved to be less viable than the breakthrough presentations of the Lumières.
He was an American actor. Bunny began his career as a stage actor, but transitioned to a film career after joining Vitagraph Studios around 1910. At Vitagraph, Bunny made over 150 short films – many of them domestic comedies with the comedian Flora Finch – and became one of the most well-known actors of his era.
Scene still from Treasure Trove (1911). Left to right are Mary Maurice, John Bunny, Julia Swayne Gordon, and Helen Gardner.
He was an American silent film actor, screenwriter, director and producer. He is remembered as a foremost Western star of the silent era who “imbued all of his characters with honor and integrity.” During the late 1910s and early 1920s, he was one of the most consistently popular movie stars, frequently ranking high among male actors in popularity contests held by movie fan magazines.
Carl Laemmle
(January 17, 1867 – September 24, 1939)
He was a German-American film producer and the co-founder and, until 1934, owner of Universal Pictures. He produced or worked on over 400 films.
He was an American comedian and actor, best remembered for his work in silent films. His trademarks were his cross-eyed appearance and adeptness at vigorous physical comedy. A sometimes vaudeville performer, he was “discovered” for film while working as the janitor for Essanay Studios in Chicago. Turpin went on to work with notable performers such as Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, and was a part of the Mack Sennett studio team. He is believed to have been the first filmed “victim” of the pie in the face gag. When sound came to films, Turpin chose to retire, having invested profitably in real estate, although he did do occasional cameos.
Taylor’s murder on 1 February 1922, along with other Hollywood scandals such as the Roscoe Arbuckle trial, led to a frenzy of sensationalist and often fabricated newspaper reports. The murder remains an official cold case.
Known professionally as Maude Adams, was an American actress and stage designer who achieved her greatest success as the character Peter Pan, first playing the role in the 1905 Broadway production of Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Adams’ personality appealed to a large audience and helped her become the most successful and highest-paid performer of her day, with a yearly income of more than $1 million during her peak.
She was a Canadian silent film actress and the mother of Actress Lottie (June 9, 1893 – December 9, 1936), and Actor Jack Pickford (August 18, 1896 – January 3, 1933), and
She was a Canadian-American film actress, producer, screenwriter and film studio founder. A pioneer in the American film industry with a Hollywood career that spanned five decades, Pickford was one of the most popular actresses of the silent film era. Beginning her film career in 1909, by 1916 Pickford became Hollywood’s first millionaire, and at the height of her career had complete creative control of her films and was one of the most recognizable women in the world. Due to her popularity, unprecedented international fame, and success as an actress and businesswoman, she was known as the “Queen of the Movies”. She was a significant figure in the development of film acting and is credited with having defined the ingénue type in cinema, a persona that also earned her the nickname “America’s Sweetheart“.
She was a French pioneer film director. She was one of the first filmmakers to make a narrative fiction film, as well as the first woman to direct a film. From 1896 to 1906, she was probably the only female filmmaker in the world. She experimented with Gaumont‘s Chronophonesync-sound system, and with color-tinting, interracial casting, and special effects. She was artistic director and a co-founder of Solax Studios in Flushing, New York.
He was an American film director. Considered one of the most influential figures in the history of the motion picture, he pioneered many aspects of film editingand expanded the art of the narrative film.
To modern audiences, Griffith is known primarily for directing the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. One of the most financially successful films of all time and considered a landmark by film historians, it has attracted much controversy for its degrading portrayals of African Americans, its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, and support for the Confederacy. The film led to riots in several major cities all over the United States and the NAACP attempted to have it banned. Griffith made his next film Intolerance (1916) as an answer to critics, who he felt unfairly maligned his work.
Together with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, Griffith founded the studio United Artists in 1919 with the goal of enabling actors and directors to make films on their own terms, as opposed to the terms of commercial studios. Several of Griffith’s later films were successful, including Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921), but the high costs he incurred for production and promotion often led to commercial failure. He had made roughly 500 films by the time of The Struggle (1931), his final feature, and all but three were completely silent.
Stamp issued by the United States Postal Service in 1975 to commemorate the centennial of Griffith’s birth.
Mary Gish
(September 16, 1876 – September 17, 1948)
She was an American actress and the mother of screen stars Lillian and Dorothy Gish.
Gish with her daughters Dorothy (left) and Lilian in 1900s
She was a Canadian singer and entertainer who billed herself as “the girl who made vaudeville famous”. She was known as “The Queen of Vaudeville” during the height of her popularity from the early 1900s until the early 1920s. Tanguay also appeared in films, and was the first performer to achieve national mass-media celebrity, with publicists and newspapers covering her tours from coast-to-coast, out-earning the likes of contemporaries Enrico Caruso and Harry Houdini at one time, and being described by Edward Bernays, “the father of public relations”, as “our first symbol of emergence from the Victorian age.
He was an American vaudeville performer, actor, and humorous social commentator. He was born as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, in the Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma), and is known as “Oklahoma’s Favorite Son”. As an entertainer and humorist, he traveled around the world three times, made 71 films (50 silent films and 21 “talkies”), and wrote more than 4,000 nationally syndicated newspaper columns.[4] By the mid-1930s, Rogers was hugely popular in the United States for his leading political wit and was the highest paid of Hollywood film stars. He died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane crashed in northern Alaska.
He was a Canadian-American producer, director, actor, and studio head who was known as the “King of Comedy” during his career.
Born in Danville, Quebec, in 1908, he started acting in films in the Biograph Company of New York City, and later opened Keystone Studios in Edendale, California in 1912. Keystone possessed the first fully enclosed film stage, and Sennett became famous as the originator of slapstick routines such as pie-throwing and car-chases, as seen in the Keystone Cops films. He also produced short features that displayed his Bathing Beauties, many of whom went on to develop successful acting careers.
After struggling with bankruptcy and the dominance of sound films in the early 1930s, Sennett was presented with an honorary Academy Award in 1938 for his contributions to the film industry, with the Academy describing him as a “master of fun, discoverer of stars, sympathetic, kindly, understanding comedy genius”.
W. C. Fields (January 29, 1880 – December 25, 1946)
He was an American actor, comedian, juggler and writer.
Fields’s career in show business began in vaudeville, where he attained international success as a silent juggler. He began to incorporate comedy into his act and was a featured comedian in the Ziegfeld Follies for several years. He became a star in the Broadway musical comedy Poppy (1923), in which he played a colorful small-time con man. His subsequent stage and film roles were often similar scoundrels or henpecked everyman characters.
Among his trademarks were his raspy drawl and grandiloquent vocabulary. His film and radio persona was generally identified with Fields himself. It was maintained by the publicity departments at Fields’s studios (Paramount and Universal) and was further reinforced by Robert Lewis Taylor’s 1949 biography W. C. Fields, His Follies and Fortunes. Beginning in 1973, with the publication of Fields’s letters, photos and personal notes in grandson Ronald Fields’s book W. C. Fields by Himself, it was shown that Fields was married (and subsequently estranged from his wife), financially supported their son and loved his grandchildren.
He was an American actor, writer, film director, and film producer, who was the first star of the Western film genre. He was a founder and star for Essanay studios. In 1958, he received a special Academy Award for being a pioneer of the film industry.
He was an American filmmaker and actor. Between 1914 and 1958, he made 70 features, both silent and sound films. He is acknowledged as a founding father of American cinema and the most commercially successful producer-director in film history with many of them dominating the box office three or four at a time. His films were distinguished by their epic scale and by his cinematic showmanship. His silent films included social dramas, comedies, Westerns, farces, morality plays, and historical pageants. He was an active Freemason and member of Prince of Orange Lodge #16 in New York City.
DeMille was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts, and grew up in New York City. He began his career as a stage actor in 1900. He later moved to writing and directing stage productions, some with Jesse L. Lasky, who was then a vaudeville producer. DeMille’s first film, The Squaw Man (1914), was also the first full-length feature film shot in Hollywood. Its interracial love story made it commercially successful, and it first publicized Hollywood as the home of the U.S. film industry. The continued success of his productions led to the founding of Paramount Pictures with Lasky and Adolph Zukor. His first biblical epic, The Ten Commandments (1923), was both a critical and commercial success; it held the Paramount revenue record for twenty-five years.
DeMille directed The King of Kings (1927), a biography of Jesus, which gained approval for its sensitivity and reached more than 800 million viewers. The Sign of the Cross (1932) is said to be the first sound film to integrate all aspects of cinematic technique. Cleopatra (1934) was his first film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. After more than thirty years in film production, DeMille reached a pinnacle in his career with Samson and Delilah (1949), a biblical epic that became the highest-grossing film of 1950. Along with biblical and historical narratives, he also directed films oriented toward “neo-naturalism”, which tried to portray the laws of man fighting the forces of nature.
He was an American film actor and the star of many early Western films between 1909 and 1935. He appeared in 291 films, all but nine of which were silent films. He was one of Hollywood’s first Western stars and helped define the genre as it emerged in the early days of the cinema.
He was an American studio executive, one of the founders of Warner Bros., and a major contributor to the development of the film industry. Along with his three younger brothers (Albert, Sam and Jack), Warner played a crucial role in the film business and establishing Warner Bros., serving as the company president until 1956.
He was a Hungarian–American actor, best remembered for portraying Count Dracula in the 1931 horror film classic Dracula, Ygor in Son of Frankenstein (1939) and his roles in many other horror films from 1931 through 1956. He even played Jesus on stage.
He was an American actor for vaudeville and stage performances, movies, and radio. He was perhaps best known for acting as the title character for the radio version of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He also starred in the The Bishop and the Gargoyle which was a 30-minute old-time radiocrime drama in the United States. It was broadcast on the NBC Blue network September 30, 1936 – January 3, 1942.The program was unique in being a radio network prime-time drama with a clergyman as its main character.
Samuel Goldwyn
(August 27, 1882 (claimed but most likely July 1879) – January 31, 1974)
was an American actor and makeup artist. He is regarded as one of the most versatile and powerful actors of cinema, renowned for his characterizations of tortured, often grotesque and afflicted, characters and for his groundbreaking artistry with makeup. Chaney was known for his starring roles in such silent horror films as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). His ability to transform himself using makeup techniques that he developed earned him the nickname “The Man of a Thousand Faces“.
He was a French actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and comedian of the silent film era. His onscreen persona “Max” was one of the first recognizable recurring characters in film. He has also been cited as the “first international movie star” and “the first film star anywhere”.
He was an American character actor who appeared in over 150 film and television productions. He also worked in radio and appeared on the stage.
Mustin began his professional acting career at the age of 67 after director William Wyler cast him in the 1951 film noirDetective Story. Known for his dependability and versatility, Mustin established a career as a well-known character actor and worked extensively in film and television from the 1950s to the 1970s His last major role was as Arthur Lanson on the CBS sitcom Phyllis, appearing on the show until shortly before his death in early 1977 at the age of 92.
He was a Jewish Canadian-American film producer and co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios (MGM) in 1924. Under Mayer’s management, MGM became the film industry’s most prestigious movie studio, accumulating the largest concentration of leading writers, directors, and stars in Hollywood.
He was an American film executive who was one of the founders of Warner Bros. He established the production studio with his brothers Harry, Sam, and Jack L. Warner. He served as the studio’s treasurer until he sold his stock in 1956. He came to Baltimore, Maryland with his mother and siblings in October 1889 on the steamship Hermann from Bremen, Germany. Their father had preceded them, immigrating to Baltimore in 1888 and following his trade in shoes and shoe repair.
George Francis “Gabby” Hayes (May 7, 1885 – February 9, 1969)
Gabby is best known for his numerous appearances in B-Western film series as the bewhiskered, cantankerous, but ever-loyal and brave comic sidekick of the cowboy stars Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers.
She was an American-born French dancer, singer, and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 French silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant.
He was one of the United States’ most famous and highest-paid stars of the 1920s and was self-billed as “The World’s Greatest Entertainer”. Jolson was known for his “shamelessly sentimental, melodramatic approach” towards performing, as well as for popularizing many of the songs he sang Jolson has been referred to by modern critics as “the king of blackface performers”.
Although best remembered today as the star of the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer (1927), he starred in a series of successful musical films during the 1930s.
Arbuckle was the defendant in three widely publicized trials between November 1921 and April 1922 for the rape and manslaughter of actress Virginia Rappe. Rappe had fallen ill at a party hosted by Arbuckle at San Francisco‘s St. Francis Hotel in September 1921, and died four days later. A friend of Rappe accused Arbuckle of raping and accidentally killing her. The first two trials resulted in hung juries, but the third trial acquitted Arbuckle. The third jury took the unusual step of giving Arbuckle a written statement of apology for his treatment by the justice system.
Despite Arbuckle’s acquittal, the scandal has mostly overshadowed his legacy as a pioneering comedian.
She was a Canadian-American stage performer and film actress. She is often referred to as the “first movie star”, and was long thought to be the first film actor to be named publicly until evidence published in 2019 indicated that the first named film star was French actor Max Linder. At the height of her fame in the 1910s, she was known as the “Biograph Girl” for work as one of the leading ladies in silent films from the Biograph Company. She appeared in almost 300 films for various motion picture companies throughout her career.
He was an American film producer who was the co-founder and chief executive officer of Warner Bros. He established the studio along with his brothers Harry, Albert, and Jack L. Warner. Sam Warner is credited with procuring the technology that enabled Warner Bros. to produce the film industry’s first feature-length talking picture, The Jazz Singer. He died in 1927, on the day before the film’s enormously successful premiere.
Boris Karloff
(November 23, 1887 – February 2, 1969),
She was a dancer from Seville and one of the most representative figures of flamencofolklore of all times. She was the great-grandmother of the Spanish actress Pastora Vega (born May 28, 1960).
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