Aileen Hamilton

Aileen Hamilton, born Aileen McLellan Hunter on January 4, 1902, in Bristol, England, was a dancer, actress, singer, screenwriter, and costume designer who performed professionally under her stage name on Broadway between 1921 and 1924. She died on June 6, 1993. Among her later achievements was writing the story behind the 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut.

Hamilton was born in the Clifton area of Bristol to Elsie Emily Hunter (née Stevenson) and William McLellan Hunter, a steamship captain. She was christened on February 2, 1902, at Kingsdown St. Matthew's Church in Cotham, Bristol. Her younger sister Alison, born in 1905, became a child actress and later a costume designer. Her younger brother, Ian McLellan Hunter, born August 8, 1915, in London, became a screenwriter of more than twenty films and series, including Roman Holiday, which he fronted for the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. Hamilton and her sister Alison were listed in the 1911 census as boarders at a private school in Cotham run by Ethel May and Constance May Gittins. The prima ballerina Phyllis Bedells, also from Bristol, later named Hamilton as one of her pupils in her autobiography.

Hamilton began performing publicly as a child. By age ten she appeared in a charity dancing program at Bristol's Victoria Rooms as one of approximately forty pupils of Edythe and Muriel Parnall of Clifton. Two years later, at a subsequent performance at the same venue, she was singled out for her solo rendition of Valse Bluette, described at the time as a charming example of toe-dancing. Five months after that, she performed twice nightly as a principal artist in a revue at the Derby Grand Theatre in aid of the War Relief Fund. In 1909, at age seven, she reportedly toured China, Japan, India, and Arabia, where she was inspired by the rhythmic movements of Indian dancers.

By 1917, at fifteen, Hamilton was performing professionally at London's Alhambra Theatre, still under her birth name, having already danced alongside the Danish-British ballerina Adeline Genée and Serge Morosov, a dancer with the Russian ballet and a prominent London teacher. The following year she worked in post-war France at the Casino de Paris in the revue Pa-Ri-Ki-Ri, which featured Maurice Chevalier and a cast of four hundred. Her mother and siblings emigrated from Southampton to New York aboard the S.S. Lapland in October 1919, joining her father, who had been a prisoner of war in Germany before finding employment in New York. The 1920 census records the family reunited in a Manhattan apartment at 324 West 83rd Street, listing Hamilton's occupation as waged actor in the stage industry.

Between August and November 1920, Hamilton performed in The Lady of the Lamp at the Republic Theatre in New York, appearing as one of the Seven Little Princesses during its 111-performance run. It was during this engagement that she adopted the stage name Aileen Hamilton. Her Broadway career followed in quick succession. She appeared as one of the Sixteen Sunshine Girls in Good Morning Dearie, a musical comedy at the Globe Theatre that ran for 347 performances from November 1, 1921, to August 26, 1922. While that production was still running, she was already rehearsing for George M. Cohan's Little Nellie Kelly at the Liberty Theatre, where Variety described her role as a specialty dancer and loose toe artist in a musical number called The Flirting Salesmen, performed with Joseph Niemeyer. Little Nellie Kelly ran for 276 performances from November 13, 1922, to July 7, 1923. In November 1924, Hamilton became a member of the Actors' Equity Association. Later that same year she appeared in the revue The Grab Bag, back at the Globe Theatre, playing Señorita, a Spanish dancer. That production ran from October 6, 1924, to March 14, 1925, and subsequently toured to venues including Werba's Brooklyn Theatre, the Lyceum Theater in Rochester, two theaters named Majestic in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Buffalo, New York, as well as engagements in Philadelphia and Boston.

In 1925, Hamilton traveled to Paris to appear in two consecutive revues at the Palace Theatre in Montmartre. In March she was summoned by telegram to replace Jenny Golder in a production called Women's Palace, as described in a letter by the English painter Edward Burra. The following month she appeared in Women and Sport, a revue in which her co-star and dancing partner was the French prizefighter and World War I hero Georges Carpentier, making his stage debut as both singer and dancer. Demand for the production was such that more than six thousand people were turned away from its first five performances. Hamilton was described in 1927 as one of Ziegfeld's protégés.

In 1928, she was promoted as an international artist of repute having appeared in England, France, and South America, and was announced as a featured player in J.P. McEvoy's forthcoming Broadway musical Americana. In January 1929, she appeared in a short-lived vaudeville-style revue called Dr. Jazz at the Fox Theater in Washington, D.C., where a reviewer noted that she performed an eccentric dance in a contortionist fashion. Around this period she also worked off-stage as costume designer for the 1930 Ginger Rogers film The Sap from Syracuse, filmed in New York. Later in 1929, Hamilton traveled to Mexico with Ben Hecht, his wife Rose Caylor, and Charles MacArthur, where the group gathered material on revolutionary fighting for their play The Moon-Shooter.