Emma Dunn

Emma Dunn (26 February 1875 – 14 December 1966) was an English actress born in Birkenhead, England, though she sometimes listed her birth year as 1883. She began performing onstage in her early teens and built experience on the London stage before establishing herself as a notable presence in American theater and film.

Dunn's Broadway career spanned from 1906 to 1927, beginning with the first American production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, in which she appeared alongside Richard Mansfield, who played the title role. Dunn portrayed Ase, Peer's mother, despite being twenty years younger than Mansfield in real life. She went on to work with prominent theater impresario David Belasco on three productions: The Warrens of Virginia in 1907, The Easiest Way in 1909, and The Governor's Lady in 1912. In The Easiest Way, she played a Black character named Annie in blackface. Additional Broadway credits included Old Lady 31, which she performed in 1916, as well as the plays Junk, Dawn, and Sonny. In 1913, Dunn also appeared in vaudeville.

Her film career began in 1914 with a silent adaptation of her 1910 stage success Mother, directed by Maurice Tourneur in his first American film. Her second film, Old Lady 31 in 1920, saw her reprise the role she had originated on Broadway four years earlier. A third silent film, Pied Piper Malone, followed in 1924. She made her sound film debut in Side Street, which co-starred the Moore brothers — Matt, Owen, and Tom — as her sons.

Beyond performing, Dunn authored two books on elocution and speech: Thought Quality in the Voice, published in 1933, and You Can Do It, published in 1947.

In her personal life, Dunn married actor Harry Beresford, then performing professionally as Harry J. Morgan, in Chicago on 4 October 1897. The couple divorced in New York City on 10 February 1909, with Dunn receiving sole custody of their daughter, Dorothy. Later that same year, on 19 May 1909, she married John W. Stokes, an actor, playwright, and theatrical manager. Together they adopted a second daughter, Helen. That marriage ended in divorce sometime between 1923 and Stokes's death in 1931.

Dunn died on 14 December 1966, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 91, several months after suffering a heart attack.