Georgette Cohan

Georgette Cohan, born Georgia Ethelia Cohan on August 26, 1900, was an American actress who performed on Broadway between 1922 and 1930. She was the daughter of entertainers George M. Cohan and Ethel Levey, who divorced in 1907 and both subsequently remarried. Cohan was raised primarily in England, where she attended a boarding school in France. Her stepfather was aviator Claude Grahame-White, and her younger half-sisters were singer Mary Cohan and actress Helen Cohan.

Cohan began her stage career in England. In 1919 she took the starring role of Peter in a Christmastime revival of Peter Pan at the New Theatre in London. That same year she appeared alongside Leslie Howard in A. A. Milne's Mr. Pim Passes By in Manchester, a production that subsequently moved to London in 1920.

Her Broadway career opened in 1922 with a starring role in Madeleine and the Movies, a play written by her father, George M. Cohan. She later appeared in Diplomacy in 1928 and The Rivalry in 1930, rounding out a stage career on Broadway that spanned eight years.

In her personal life, Cohan eloped with businessman J. William Souther in 1921. He died from a ruptured appendix in 1925. She married widowed manufacturer William Hamilton Rowse in 1926, and the two divorced in 1927. The National Portrait Gallery holds three photographs of Cohan taken by Bassano in 1913, two of which also feature her mother. A collection of her photographs and memorabilia is held in the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library. Cohan died on October 26, 1988, at the age of 88, and is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.