Beulah Poynter

Beulah Marguerite Poynter (June 6, 1883 – August 13, 1960) was an American actress, playwright, and fiction writer born in Eagleville, Missouri and raised in the nearby town of Bethany. Her father, Henry Douglas Poynter, was a hotel manager whose family traced its roots from Kentucky, and her mother, Lucy "Lula" Walters, was an Iowa native of Ohio parentage. Poynter had two younger brothers, Fred and Victor, and counted James Nevill, a Virginia veteran of the American Revolutionary War, among her paternal ancestors. After attending local schools, she entered show business around the age of sixteen by joining the chorus of a local opera company.

Though Poynter accumulated Broadway credits as both a performer and playwright, the greater part of her theatrical reputation was built through stock and touring productions. By 1904 she had risen to leading-actress status, touring with the Eastern Company in Langdon McCormick's comedy-drama Out of the Fold. The following year she joined the Pavilion Stock Company for a road production of Charles Hale Hoyt's farce comedy A Texas Steer, in which she played the role of Bossy. In August 1905 she embarked on a tour in the title role of Dora Thorne, a dramatization of Charlotte Mary Brame's novel adapted by Edward W. Roland and Edwin Clifford.

Beginning in October 1906, Poynter launched what would become her most enduring stage association, touring with Nixon and Co. in the title role of Lena Rivers, a drama she herself had adapted from the novel by Mary J. Holmes. The production proved commercially successful and continued to tour with Poynter in the lead for four seasons. She published the dramatization in 1906, and it remained among her most recognized works throughout her career. In August 1910 she began touring in The Little Girl He Forgot, a drama she both wrote and starred in under the name June Holly. That same year she also staged a dramatization of Edward Eggleston's novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster and her original play Mother's Girl during an engagement at the Majestic Theatre in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In October 1910 she appeared as Rosalie in Edward Peple's drama The Call of the Cricket at the Park Theatre in Indianapolis.

Poynter continued to lead her own touring company through revivals of Lena Rivers, The Little Girl He Forgot, and Mother's Girl into the following years. By November 1911 she was starring in road productions of A Kentucky Romance, a dramatic comedy written expressly for her by Joseph Le Brandt. Her company toured A Kentucky Romance and Lena Rivers into early 1913, after which she joined a vaudeville company that spring with a farce sketch called Dear Doctor.

Poynter's Broadway career encompassed three productions. She wrote The Unborn, which reached Broadway in 1915, and One Way Street, which opened at George M. Cohan's Theatre in December 1928 and ran for fifty-eight performances before closing in February 1929, making it the most commercially successful of her three Broadway productions. As a performer, she appeared at the Harris Theatre in Times Square in the 1919 farce comedy Who Did It?, written by Stephen Gardner Champlin, playing the role of Ethel Tate. The Unborn generated legal controversy when Poynter filed a plagiarism suit against the producers of the 1916 motion picture The Sins that Ye Sin, alleging they had copied her play. The court found insufficient evidence to support the claim and dismissed the case.

Poynter also worked in silent film. She reprised her stage roles in Hollywood adaptations of Lena Rivers and The Little Girl That He Forgot, both released in 1914 and 1915 respectively, and appeared in four additional silent films: The Ordeal, Born Again, and Hearts and Flowers, all from 1914, and Hearts of Men in 1915. Three later films — The Miracle of Money (1920), The Splendid Folly (1933), and Love Is Dangerous (1933) — were adapted from her written works.

Alongside her stage and screen work, Poynter was a prolific author of mystery and romance fiction, producing dozens of novels and short stories from the 1900s through the 1950s. Her literary output included works such as The Murillo Mystery (1927), Murder on 47th Street (1931), and a long series of romance novels published through the late 1920s and 1930s with titles including The Girl at the Stage Door, Gay Caprice, and Donna of the Big Top. Her final published work, White Trash, appeared in 1952.

In her personal life, Poynter married three times. On November 19, 1904, she wed actor Burton S. Nixon, a native of Nevada, Missouri, at Creston, Iowa; Nixon served as her stage and business manager during their marriage. She subsequently married John Bowers, born Bowersox, who had been her leading man in the early 1910s. Her third husband was George Leffler (1874–1951), a former actor who had become a theatrical producer and booking agent; that marriage ended with his death in 1951. Poynter died nine years later, on August 13, 1960, at Manhasset, Long Island, at the age of seventy-seven.