Grace La Rue

Grace La Rue, born Stella Parsons on April 23, 1882, in Kansas City, Missouri, was an American actress, singer, and vaudeville headliner whose career spanned Broadway, vaudeville, film, and international stages. She died on March 13, 1956, at Peninsula Hospital in Burlingame, California.

La Rue entered show business as a teenager with a traveling tent show and married William T. Gray while still in her teens, with whom she had two daughters. An early phase of her professional life included performing as part of a duo called Burke and La Rue alongside her second husband, Charles Burke, whose act included a minstrel number billed as "Grace La Rue and her Inky Dinks." She eventually left both the partnership and Burke to pursue musical comedy on her own.

Her Broadway career ran from 1906 to 1930, beginning with The Tourists in 1906. That same year she appeared in The Blue Moon, and she went on to perform in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1907 and 1908. Additional Broadway credits included Molly May in 1910, Betsy in 1911, Luana, Sweet Adeline, and Stepping Out, among other productions. In 1922 and 1923, she appeared in Irving Berlin's second Music Box Revue at the Music Box Theatre in New York, and in 1928 she performed in the Greenwich Village Follies at the Winter Garden Theatre.

In November 1912, La Rue launched her solo vaudeville career at Poli's in Springfield, Missouri. Her act incorporated an aria from Madame Butterfly and a duet performed alongside a phonograph recording of Enrico Caruso. Variety reviewed the debut favorably, noting that the act gave La Rue the opportunity to display her Parisian-cultivated voice. On August 4, 1913, she made her debut at the Palace Theatre, where her set included "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)" from Honeymoon Express, a production in which she had appeared with Al Jolson. Later that same year she brought her act to Britain, performing at the London Palace and recording hit songs from her act for gramophone release. In 1924, she returned to London to appear at the Coliseum with her then-husband Hale Hamilton.

La Rue married Byron Chandler in Bennington, Vermont, in 1909. The marriage ended in 1914 when she filed for divorce, alleging infidelity and physical abuse. In 1919, she made her screen debut opposite Hale Hamilton in the melodrama That's Good. She married Hamilton on May 29, 1920, amid controversy stemming from a lawsuit filed by Hamilton's second wife, actress Myrtle Tannehill. In 1929, La Rue appeared in a Vitaphone short titled Grace La Rue: The International Star of Song. By the early 1930s she had relocated to California, where she made a brief appearance in the 1933 Mae West film She Done Him Wrong before retiring from performing.