Amy Leslie

Amy Leslie, born Lillian West on October 11, 1855, in West Burlington, Iowa, was an American actress, opera singer, and drama critic who died on July 3, 1939. She trained at the Conservatory of Vocal Music at St. Mary's Academy in Notre Dame, Indiana, completing her studies there in 1874, and subsequently pursued further musical education in Europe and at the Chicago Conservatory of Music. Performing under the billing "Lillie West," she built an early career as a singer in operettas, including a role in La mascotte, in which she played Fiametta.

Her Broadway career included an appearance in 1906 in the musical Rufus Rastus. Beyond the stage, Leslie became a prominent figure in American journalism, joining the Chicago Daily News in 1890 and adopting the pen name Amy Leslie for her contributions. She served as the paper's drama critic, a position she held until her retirement in 1930. Among her contemporaries in the press, she was one of very few women working as drama critics, and the only one based in Chicago. In that capacity she wrote extensively about the leading theatrical figures of her era, among them Annie Oakley, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Russell, and Lillie Langtry. She also authored published works including Some Players: Personal Sketches, released by Herbert S. Stone and Co. in Chicago in 1891, and Amy Leslie at the Fair, published by W.B. Conkey in Chicago in 1893.

In her personal life, Leslie married Harry Brown, an opera singer, while performing in La mascotte. Brown later abandoned her, and their son, Francis Albert, died of diphtheria in 1889. Following her divorce from Brown, she lived in New York with writer Stephen Crane at a house at 121 West 27th Street. In 1901, at the age of 46, she married Frank Buck, who was 17 years old at the time and had been working as a captain of bellboys at the Virginia Hotel in Chicago, where Leslie was residing. Buck was 29 years her junior. The two divorced in 1913.

Leslie died at her home in Chicago's Parkway Hotel, where the recorded causes of death were diffuse arteriosclerosis and a brain tumor. Her remains were cremated.