Effie Ellsler

Euphemia "Effie" Ellsler, born September 17, 1855, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was an American stage and screen actress whose performing career began in childhood and extended into the 1930s. She died on October 8, 1942, in Los Angeles, California. The daughter of actors John Ellsler and Euphemia Murray Ellsler, she made her first stage appearance at the age of three at the Academy of Music in Cleveland, Ohio, then under her father's management, playing the Genie of the Ring in Aladdin; or, The Wonderful Lamp. At four she was cast as Little Eva in a stage adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. During her early years she took on juvenile roles with her father's stock company while attending the local Ursuline Convent and studying ballet with her mother's assistance. One early performance in Macbeth required her to appear as an apparition behind a boiling caldron; startled by a flash of red fire, she forgot her lines, recovered, and read them directly from a copy of the play she had tucked into her dress.

By the age of sixteen Ellsler had become a regular player in her father's company, taking on roles ranging from minor parts to leading lady in Shakespearean productions. Around the age of twenty-three she starred at her father's Euclid Avenue Opera House in A Heroine in Rags, a comedy-drama written expressly for her by playwright Bartley Campbell. Her career reached a turning point in 1880 when she created the title role in Steele MacKaye's Hazel Kirke at the Madison Square Theatre in New York, a part she continued to perform for nearly three years before her physician advised her to stop. That same year marked the beginning of her Broadway career, which would span from 1880 to 1920 and include productions such as The Merchant of Venice, The Gipsy Trail, We Are Seven, and The Phantom Legion, among others.

On November 26, 1884, Ellsler opened at the Union Square Theatre in New York as Priscilla Sefton in the American debut of Robert W. Buchanan's Storm Beaten, and two months later appeared at the same venue as Mabel Blair in the premiere of Bartley Campbell's Separation. By late 1885 journalist Marcus Klaw had engaged her to star in a national tour of Frank Harver's Woman Against Woman, in which she played Bessie Barton, a self-sacrificing character whose actions preserve the reputation of an ungrateful sister. With A. L. Erlanger serving as the company's advance man, the production toured successfully for three seasons. Among the other notable works she performed in subsequent decades, either in New York or on tour, were Camille, Clinton Stuart's The Keepsake, Frank Hervey's Judge Not, Laura Don's Egypt: or a Daughter of the Nile, and Barbara Frietchie by Clyde Fitch, in which she replaced Julia Marlowe.

Ellsler's final Broadway appearance came at the Morosco Theatre in September 1922, following a two-year run in The Bat, a three-act mystery melodrama by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood. Two nights before the production's closing, she collapsed during a performance but insisted on returning for the final two engagements against medical advice. The circumstances surrounding that run were marked by personal loss as well: she received word of her husband's death while appearing in the play and chose to continue performing because no understudy was available for her role.

Ellsler had married fellow actor Frank Weston on May 25, 1881, in Chicago. Weston had performed opposite Edwin Booth, Edward Loomis Davenport, and Lawrence Barrett, and had been a leading actor at McVicker's Theatre in Chicago and with John Ellsler's company in Cleveland. Together, Effie Ellsler and Weston later formed their own stock company, which was active during the latter years of the nineteenth century. Weston, who had served in the American Civil War as a boy, died on January 27, 1922, at the age of seventy, from pneumonia following a three-day illness.

Ellsler made her film debut in Old Ironsides in 1926, playing the mother of Esther Ralston's character. Over the following decade she appeared in at least twenty-two motion pictures, including The Front Page (1931), in which she played Mary Brian's mother; Daddy Long Legs (1931), in the role of Mrs. Semple; Black Fury (1935), as Bubitschka; and the Western Drift Fence (1936), as Granny Dunn. She retired from the screen after playing Grandma Duval in the 1936 Greta Garbo film adaptation of Dumas' Camille.

For a number of years Ellsler resided in Nutley, New Jersey. Following the 1938 death of her sister Addie, she relocated to Los Angeles, where she died on October 8, 1942. Her siblings included John J. Ellsler, who died in 1925, and William Cary Ellsler, who died in 1936. Her nephew was John Park Ellsler (1882–1940), the son of her brother John J. Ellsler.