Alexandra Carlisle

Alexandra Carlisle, born Alexandra Elizabeth Swift on 15 January 1886 in Hackney, Middlesex, was an English actress and suffragist who built a career spanning both British and American stages. The daughter of Henry Swift, a schoolmaster, and his wife Alexandra, she began performing in her teens, taking the role of Audrey in a stage production of As You Like It and Maria in Twelfth Night in 1903. Her Broadway career extended from 1908 to 1936 and included productions such as Fools Errant, Oliver Oliver, Criminal at Large, Othello, and A Woman of Destiny, among others.

Carlisle's early professional work in Britain brought her to prominent venues and notable collaborators. In March 1907 she played the lead in Gladys Buchanan Unger's Mr. Sheridan at the Garrick Theatre, and that September she returned to the same theatre to take the title role in Hubert Henry Davies's The Mollusc alongside Joseph Coyne. That same year she appeared in two Shakespeare productions staged by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, playing Olivia in Twelfth Night and Portia in The Merchant of Venice. On 17 May 1911, she performed the role of Georgina Vesey in a royal command performance of Money at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, presented before King George V and the Emperor and Empress of Germany.

Her personal life underwent several changes during these years. She had married Victor Herbert Miller in 1905 at Maidenhead, petitioned for divorce in 1907, and subsequently married Joseph Coyne, her leading man from The Mollusc, in 1908. That marriage also ended in divorce. In 1912, in Marylebone, London, she married Albert Pfeiffer, a dental surgeon from Bedford, Massachusetts, and by this union had one daughter, Elizabeth Ann Pfeiffer. She was also known in the United States as Alexandra Carlisle Pfeiffer. Following her mother's death in 1914, Carlisle settled in the United States in 1915, where she became a notable public speaker on behalf of women's suffrage and the Republican Party.

Her American career encompassed stage, film, and civic life. She starred in The Country Cousin on Broadway in 1917 and that same year appeared in the film The Tides of Fate as Fanny Lawson. In the spring of 1920 she directed Barnum Was Right for Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club, and at the Republican National Convention that same year she served as the main speaker for Massachusetts and seconded the nomination of Calvin Coolidge as the party's candidate for vice president. In 1926 she directed a production of The Tragedy of Nan at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, which ran from 25 March to 10 April.

Her third marriage to Pfeiffer was dissolved in 1923, after which she married J. Elliot Jenkins, an American engineer. Jenkins died by suicide in 1934, the same year Carlisle appeared in the film Half a Sinner as Mrs. Mary Clarke. She continued performing on Broadway into the mid-1930s, including the role of Lady Macduff in a production of Macbeth in October 1935. Carlisle died of a heart attack on 21 April 1936 at the Hotel Astor in New York City and was buried in Shawsheen Cemetery.