Constance Binney

Constance Binney (June 28, 1896 – November 15, 1989) was an American actress, dancer, and stage performer whose career spanned Broadway, silent film, and the London stage. Born in New York City, she was educated at Westover School, a private college preparatory boarding school in Middlebury, Connecticut, and also received education in Paris, France. Her father, Harold Osgood Binney, and her mother, Gertrude Miles, came from wealthy and socially prominent families. A maternal uncle, Basil Miles, served as an American diplomat to Russia during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. In 1934, Binney told a newspaper reporter, "I was born a society wench, and I've resented it ever since."

Binney made her Broadway debut in Saturday to Monday in 1917, launching a stage career that continued through 1924. Her subsequent Broadway appearances included the musical Oh, Lady! Lady! in 1918, the play 39 East in 1919, and the musical Sweet Little Devil in 1924. She holds a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on the 6300 block of Hollywood Boulevard.

Her film career began in 1918 when she appeared alongside her actress sister, Faire Binney, in the Maurice Tourneur silent film Sporting Life. The following year she starred opposite John Barrymore in The Test of Honor. Modern assessment of her film work is constrained by the loss of most of her pictures, with only two surviving in complete form — Erstwhile Susan and The Case of Becky — along with a single reel of First Love.

Binney married Charles Edward Cotting, Jr., a Boston banker, in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1926; that marriage ended in divorce in 1932. Two months later she married Henry Wharton, Jr., a prominent Philadelphia attorney, in a ceremony at New York City Hall, though that marriage also ended in divorce. In 1941, during the Second World War, she married British Royal Air Force pilot Geoffrey Leonard Cheshire, later Baron Cheshire, who was twenty years her junior. The marriage produced no children, and the couple became estranged after the war, divorcing in 1951. Binney also performed on stage in London following the conclusion of her Broadway career. She died in 1989 in Queens, New York City, at the age of 93.