Anne Elstner

Anne Elstner Matthews (January 22, 1899 – January 29, 1981) was an American actress whose career spanned stage, Broadway, and radio. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, she was the youngest of eight children of Joseph and Sallie Elstner. Her father, an accountant, relocated the family repeatedly as he moved from job to job, including a period of several years in San Benito, Texas. Elstner began her freshman year of high school at Senn High School in Chicago before transferring to Mount de Chantal Visitation Academy, a private Catholic all-girls school in Wheeling, West Virginia that had also been her mother's alma mater. She took lead roles in school productions there and graduated in 1918.

After relocating to New York City, Elstner held various jobs while studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. An understudy role in the play Liliom preceded her Broadway debut, and she went on to appear on Broadway between 1923 and 1928, with credits including the play Sun-Up. Her performance in the 1923 production drew notice from The Wall Street Journal, which on July 27 of that year commended her for what it described as a faithful portrayal of an unattractive but moving mountain girl. She married Jack Matthews, Jr., at Manhattan's Little Church Around the Corner and subsequently left the stage to live with her husband on a farm in Maryland. When that venture did not succeed, she returned to New York in 1928 and reprised her lead role in Sun-Up.

Elstner's radio career began as early as 1923, when a December newspaper listing placed her as a reader on a morning program on WEAF in New York City, a detail later confirmed by a 1954 newspaper report stating she had obtained her first radio role that year. In the early 1930s she appeared in the NBC serial Moonshine and Honeysuckle, which ran from 1930 to 1933, playing Cracker Gaddis in serialized stories centered on the lives of mountain people. Her radio workload grew to the point where she was performing on as many as ten programs in a single day.

Her most prominent role came in 1936, when she was chosen from among dozens of auditioners to play the title character in Stella Dallas, a radio serial based on the novel of the same name by Olive Higgins Prouty. The New York Times described the character as a beautiful daughter of an impoverished farmhand who had married above her station in life. Elstner voiced Stella Dallas for the entirety of the program's run on NBC Radio from 1937 to 1955, a span of eighteen years, missing only one performance during that time. She commuted daily to her performances from her home in Stockton, New Jersey. The role of her on-air husband, Stephen Dallas, was portrayed over the course of the series by Arthur Hughes, Neil Malley, Leo McCabe, and Frederick Tazere.

In 1953, Elstner and her husband opened a restaurant in Lambertville, New Jersey called River's Edge, which she would work at after completing her daily radio performances. With authorization from the show's producers, the restaurant was later renamed Stella Dallas' Rivers Edge Restaurant, attracting fans who came to meet the actress. The couple operated the establishment until 1973. Elstner was among the twenty-one members inducted into the first class of the National Broadcasters Hall of Fame, joining honorees that included Arthur Godfrey. She died of a stroke on January 29, 1981, at Doylestown Hospital in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, one week after her eighty-second birthday.