Alberta Gallatin

Alberta Gallatin (April 5, 1861 – August 25, 1948) was an American stage and film actress born Alberta Gallatin Jenkins near present-day Lesage, in Cabell County, West Virginia. Her father, Albert Gallatin Jenkins, was a Harvard-educated attorney, planter, and Virginia congressman who served as a Confederate general during the Civil War and was a descendant of the politician and diplomat Albert Gallatin. Her mother, Virginia Southard Bowlin, was the daughter of Missouri congressman James Butler Bowlin. Following her father's death at the Battle of Cloyd's Mountain, Gallatin was legally adopted by her maternal grandfather. Her mother subsequently married George Center Brown, an attorney and newspaper correspondent who in 1867 covered the signing of the Medicine Lodge Treaty alongside journalist Henry Morton Stanley. Gallatin was raised in St. Louis, where she attended the Mary Institute and became a figure in local social circles before making her professional acting debut during the 1885–1886 theatre season.

Over a career spanning nearly four decades, Gallatin performed alongside some of the most prominent theatrical figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Elizabeth Crocker Bowers, James O'Neil, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Thomas W. Keene, Richard Mansfield, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Minnie Maddern Fiske, Otis Skinner, Maurice Barrymore, Joseph Adler, E. H. Sothern, and James K. Hackett. In February 1886 she appeared at the Leubrie Theatre in Memphis in Princess Anréa, an adaptation of Victorien Sardou's work, playing a flirtatious baroness opposite Madame Janish. That fall she toured with Elizabeth Crocker Bowers in Edmund Falconer's historical drama Mary Stuart, playing Lady Jane Gray, and the production began a four-week Broadway run at the Fourteenth Street Theatre on October 4, 1886. Gallatin continued with Bowers' company in additional productions including Elisabeth, Lady Audley's Secret, Lucretia Borgia, and The Jealous Wife. During a matinée performance of Lady Audley's Secret at the Masonic Opera House in Augusta, Georgia, on February 12, 1887, a fire destroyed the theater and two adjacent hotels; Gallatin's wardrobe alone, lost in the blaze, was valued at approximately $800.

By June 1888 Gallatin was touring with the King Hedley Company in Frank Harvey's melodrama The Wages of Sin, and that fall she led her own troupe, The Efficient Company, in a production of Ingomar. In the fall of 1889 she joined the Lyceum Theatre Company stock company as a general understudy under the management of Daniel Frohman. The following year she toured with a company headed by James O'Neil, playing Catherine Duvall in Walter Herries Pollock's revision of The Dead Heart, and in 1891 she toured with Thomas W. Keene in productions of Shakespeare's Richard III, Richelieu, and Louis XI. On May 26, 1892, she appeared at the Madison Square Theatre in a special matinée of Shakespeare's As You Like It, playing Rosalind to Otis Skinner's Orlando, a performance that drew critical praise. During the 1893–94 season she supported Richard Mansfield in road productions that included Clyde Fitch's Beau Brummel, The Merchant of Venice, A Parisian Romance, Prince Karl, and an adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

In the latter years of the 1890s Gallatin appeared with E. H. Sothern in An Enemy to the King, with Minnie Maddern Fiske in Love Finds the Way, and with Chauncey Olcott in Sweet Inniscarra. By late 1898 she had joined Edwin Thanhouser's company at the Milwaukee Academy of Music, where she played Ophelia to Henry Miller's Hamlet. In January 1900 she appeared at Boston's Castle Square Theatre in The Great Diamond Robbery, and the following month she played Margaret Knowlton in The Lost Paradise at the Murray Hill Theatre in Manhattan. Beginning in late March 1900 she undertook a long tour in the title role of Clyde Fitch's Sappho, a production that had made its Broadway debut earlier that year with Olga Nethersole. Subsequent touring roles included Nell Gwyn in Under the Restoration, Rosalind in As You Like It, Mrs. Alving in Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, Tracy Auberton in A Clean Slate, Kate Curtis in Cousin Kate, the title role in her own dramatization of Charles Major's novel Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, and the starring role in Judith of the Plains. Gallatin was particularly associated by theatergoers with her classical roles, including Mrs. Alving in Ghosts and the central character in Franz Grillparzer's tragedy Sappho.

Between 1911 and 1925 Gallatin appeared in seven Broadway productions, among them When the Young Vine Blooms, Ghosts, The Guilty Conscience, The Strugglers, and Cain. She also appeared in a small number of silent films during the early 1910s, including the 1914 production The Christian, an eight-reel film based on the novel by Hall Caine, in which she played the role of Mrs. MacCrea. On March 29, 1917, Gallatin filed a design with the United States Patent Office for a roller-based device intended to assist stagehands in moving and changing scenery during theatrical productions. In 1920 she founded the Edgar Allan Poe Society of New York and served as its first president for seventeen years. What may have been her final public performance took place on January 13, 1939, at the Waldorf Astoria New York, where she both wrote and produced The Sale of the Raven, a playlet performed for a program sponsored by The Society of Virginia Women in New York. Gallatin died on August 25, 1948. At least one of her obituaries recorded that the American critic Alexander Woollcott had considered her the greatest American-born actress ever to grace the stage.