Clara Bloodgood

Clara Bloodgood (born Clara Sutton Stephens, August 28, 1868 – December 5, 1907) was an American socialite turned Broadway stage actress whose career spanned from 1899 to 1907. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, she was the daughter of Edward Stephens, a prominent New York attorney and son of author Ann S. Stephens, and Annie Maria Sutton Stephens, who belonged to a trio of sisters celebrated in New York society as "the beautiful Sutton girls." As a young girl, Bloodgood received her education at St. Johns School in Brighton, England.

Her personal life before the stage was marked by two early marriages. Around the age of seventeen she drew the attention of William Moller Havemeyer, son of a wealthy sugar manufacturer and member of the Havemeyer family, and John "Jack" Bloodgood, Jr., whose father had accumulated a fortune in banking in the years following the American Civil War. She eloped with Havemeyer in 1887 and divorced him within approximately a year. She subsequently married Bloodgood in 1889, but he lost both his inheritance and his health in short order, and his death in 1897 left her in serious financial difficulty. That circumstance prompted her to pursue a career in theater. In 1902 she married William Laimbeer, a New York stockbroker.

Bloodgood made her stage debut in January 1898 at the Empire Theatre in New York, taking a minor role in The Conquerors. The following season, at the same theater, she originated the role of Beatrice Hipgrave in Phroso. She went on to support Annie Russell in productions of Catherine and Miss Hobbs, and toured with Amelia Bingham's Company in The Climbers. She also appeared alongside Arnold Daly in How He Lied to Her Husband and in a Boston production of The Gentleman from India. In 1905 she played Violet Robinson in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman at the Hudson Theatre in New York, appearing opposite Robert Loraine. Her Broadway credits further included The Girl with the Green Eyes and The Truth. She became a leading interpreter of plays by Clyde Fitch and worked with prominent Broadway impresarios including Charles Frohman, Charles Dillingham, and Henry B. Harris. The actress and later screenwriter Zelda Sears, who appeared with Bloodgood in her final production, The Truth, was reported to be her closest friend in the profession.

On the night of December 5, 1907, shortly before a scheduled performance of The Truth in Baltimore, Bloodgood shot herself in her hotel room. A copy of a book titled How to Shoot Straight and a .38-caliber revolver were found nearby. The production had not been a commercial success, and she had taken it on tour that fall. Financial losses connected to a failed business venture of her husband's, along with anxiety over her career, were cited as possible contributing factors, though the precise motives for her death were never definitively established. She was thirty-nine years old.