Edith Ostlere

Edith Ostlere, born Edith Elizabeth Bury on 12 August 1871 in Surbiton, Surrey, was a British actress, writer, and playwright who also worked under the pseudonym Robert Ord. The daughter of Henry Cox Bury and Catherine Blanche Mousley Bury, she built a career spanning stage performance, short fiction, and dramatic writing before her death on 12 September 1931 in London.

Ostlere's performing career in Great Britain began in the late nineteenth century and encompassed a wide range of productions. Her stage credits included The Double Marriage in 1888, Paul Kauvar in 1894, A Gaiety Girl and One of the Best in 1895, A Bunch of Violets and The Seats of the Mighty across 1896 and 1897, The Baron's Wager and More than Ever in 1897, and both The King's Outcast and The Man in the Iron Mask in 1899. She also appeared in Kenyon's Widow, The Squire, and A Fool's Paradise, as well as Dr. Wake's Patient during 1905 and 1906. Her Broadway appearances came in 1907, when she performed in The Love Thief and Dr. Wake's Patient.

Alongside her acting work, Ostlere pursued a parallel career as a writer. She contributed a chapter to a collaborative novel, A 'Novel' Novel: A Strange Story, published in 1892, and released a collection of short stories, From Seven Dials, in 1898. A short story, "The Perfidious Frenchman," appeared in 1902, and decades later she co-wrote a time-travel story, "The Heat Wave: A Strange Story of Ancient Rome and Modern New York," with Marion Ryan in 1929. Writing as Robert Ord, she co-authored several plays with her husband, actor and playwright William Gayer Starbuck Mackay, among them Dr. Wake's Patient in 1904, Barry Doyle's Rest Cure in 1907, The Port Arms in 1909, A Midnight Visitor in 1911, A Thief in 1914, and The Prize in 1915. The pair also co-adapted Gertrude Page's novel Paddy the Next Best Thing for the stage in 1908.

In her personal life, Ostlere first married actor William Thomas Lapthorne in 1891. The couple separated in 1897 and divorced in 1906. She married William Gayer Starbuck Mackay in July 1907; he died in 1920. Ostlere died in London in 1931 at the age of sixty.