Daphne Pollard

Daphne Pollard, born Daphne Trott on October 19, 1891, in the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, Australia, was a vaudeville performer, dancer, and stage comedian whose career spanned Broadway, the London stage, and American film. She died in Los Angeles on February 22, 1978, at the age of 86.

Pollard's performing life began at the age of six when her older sister Ivy, herself a performer, brought her to rehearsals for the Pollard Lilliputian Opera Company. The company featured performers between the ages of six and sixteen and staged light opera, operetta, and musical comedy, drawing from composers such as Lecocq and Offenbach. The troupe toured Australia, New Zealand, and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like a number of the company's performers, Daphne Trott adopted the Pollard name as her stage surname. The company first brought her to Los Angeles in September 1901, where she received favorable notices, and returned to North America from late 1905. In a November 1903 review, the Los Angeles Herald described her as possessing a full contralto speaking voice, strong mimicry, and a personality it called the crown of her abilities. In later years she claimed a family connection to Australian cricketers Albert Trott and Harry Trott.

By 1907, Pollard had established sufficient confidence and popularity to perform independently of the company. Her Broadway debut came in 1908 in the musical Mr. Hamlet of Broadway, starring Eddie Foy. That same year she appeared at the Grand Opera House with a New York company performing productions including The Thief, The Chorus Lady, The Witching Hour, and Girls, alongside actors Harry Macdonough and Charles Halton. In 1909 she performed at Keith and Proctor's Fifth Avenue Theater. Pollard also appeared with the Ziegfeld Follies and in Winter Garden Theatre productions. Her Broadway activity continued with The Passing Show of 1912, and she later appeared in the 1923 revue The Greenwich Village Follies, completing a Broadway career that stretched from 1908 to 1923.

Outside her verified Broadway credits, Pollard accumulated a substantial stage record in other venues. She appeared at the Morosco Theatre in Manhattan in 1914 in The Girl Behind the Counter, a production that also featured Al Shean. In 1917 she traveled to London, where she played the role of "She of the Tireless Tongue" in the revue Zig-Zag!, produced by Albert de Courville with music by Dave Stamper and Gene Buck, and featuring English comedian and singer George Robey. The production ran for 648 performances at the Hippodrome before moving to the Folies Bergère in Paris at the end of that year. Pollard remained with the show for the Paris engagement and subsequently appeared in additional Hippodrome productions: Box o' Tricks in 1918, Joy Bells in 1919, and Jig-Saw! in 1920.

In June 1927, Mack Sennett signed Pollard, describing her publicly as an internationally famous musical comedy and vaudeville star. She was cast in a series of two-reel productions known as Sennett Girl Comedies, designed to showcase the studio's actresses, with other performers in the series including Carole Lombard, Anita Barnes, and Kathryn Stanley. Her first film for Sennett was The Girl from Everywhere, in which she received title billing. Some of the productions incorporated short two-strip Technicolor sequences. Lombard and Pollard became close friends during their time at the studio. In 1928 Sennett retooled his operation for talking pictures and canceled talent contracts. Between 1928 and 1935, Pollard accumulated nearly 60 screen credits, working for RKO-Pathe, Universal Pictures, and Vitaphone. At the Vitaphone studio in Brooklyn in 1934 and 1935, she was paired with vaudeville comedian Shemp Howard in three two-reel knockabout comedies directed by Lloyd French. In 1935, producer Hal Roach signed her to appear with Laurel and Hardy in Hollywood. She continued in supporting roles into the early 1940s, with her final screen appearance being a gag role in the Laurel and Hardy film The Dancing Masters in 1943.

In July 1911, at the age of nineteen, Pollard married journalist Ellington Strother Bunch. Following 1911, her parents and five of her siblings relocated to the United States and settled in Seattle, while an older sister, Hilda, who had married, remained in Melbourne.