Beatrice Beckley

Beatrice Mary Beckley (4 June 1882 – 8 February 1959) was an English-born American actress who worked in both stage and screen productions across a career spanning several decades. Born in Hampstead, London, to Lt. Col. Thomas Beckley and Emily Margaretta Hernulewicz, she received her theatrical training under Geneviève Ward. Her earliest stage experience came through an amateur production of W. S. Gilbert's Pygmalion and Galatea at Hampstead Town Hall, and she made her professional London debut in 1901 in H. V. Esmond's The Wilderness before relocating to the United States.

In America, Beckley spent four seasons performing with the company of actor-manager James K. Hackett, appearing opposite him in productions including The Walls of Jericho, Samson, and The Prisoner of Zenda. On 16 December 1911, she and Hackett married in a lawyer's office in Milwaukee. She later reprised her stage work on screen, appearing in film adaptations of The Prisoner of Zenda in 1913 and Should a Husband Forgive? in 1919.

Her Broadway career ran from 1905 to 1919 and encompassed a range of productions, among them Declassee, An Ideal Husband, Why Marry?, The Big Knife, and Caliban of the Yellow Sands.

When Hackett died in Paris on 8 November 1926, he was cremated there and his ashes were interred in the family vault at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York. Beckley inherited a life interest in the majority of his estate, along with more than $273,000. She died at the Hôtel du Louvre in Monte Carlo at the age of 73, from complications related to Parkinson's disease. Her estate at the time of her death was valued at £5,127.