Irene Delroy

Irene Delroy, born Josephine Lucille Sanders on July 21, 1900, in Bloomington, Illinois, was an American stage actress who performed on Broadway between 1920 and 1929. She died on June 14, 1985. The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Roy Sanders, she attended both Bloomington High School and University High School before pursuing a career in performance.

Delroy's earliest professional work was as a ballet dancer with the Chicago Opera Company. When the company traveled to New York City in 1920, she departed from the troupe to join a production called A Night Off in Plainfield, New Jersey. That venture collapsed within two weeks when its producers abandoned the project to return to their previous occupations. She went back to Chicago and joined a production of Angel Face, which itself came to an early end during an Actors' Equity Association strike. Despite these setbacks, Delroy made her Broadway debut that same year in the musical revue Frivolities of 1920.

Her Broadway career gained considerable momentum through the mid-1920s. She appeared in The Greenwich Village Follies in 1923 and continued with that production through 1926, and also performed in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927. A December 25, 1925, review in The New York Times noted her presence in the Greenwich Village Follies production. She also took leading roles in the musical Round the Town in 1924. Later Broadway credits included the musicals Here's Howe and Follow Thru, both in 1928 and 1929 respectively, as well as Top Speed, which ran from 1929 into 1930.

Following her stage career, Delroy appeared in several early sound films, among them Oh! Sailor Behave and The Life of the Party, both in 1930, and Men of the Sky in 1931. She retired from the entertainment industry after marrying W. L. Austin, Jr. on July 15, 1931. Austin served as president of Island Park Associates, Inc., the company that operated Atlantic Beach and part of Rockaway Point. During their honeymoon in Murray Bay, Quebec, Canada, Delroy fell from a horse, sustaining a slight skull fracture, a concussion, a double fracture of a finger, and a dislocation of a bone near the hip. She and Austin were divorced on July 1, 1937.