Jane Peyton

Jane Peyton (October 26, 1870 – September 8, 1946) was an American stage actress who performed on Broadway between 1900 and 1913, appearing in both lead and supporting roles. Born Jennie Van Norman in Spring Green, Wisconsin, she was the daughter of George Bosworth Van Norman and Elizabeth Atkinson. Her father had served as a sergeant and drill master with Company H, Wisconsin 8th Infantry Regiment during the Civil War, and afterward built a meat packing business in Spring Green that grew to include branches in Milwaukee and Chicago, eventually employing more than 200 workers. Her mother, a Maine native, died in Milwaukee on October 24, 1875, at the age of 37. Van Norman subsequently married Cornelia Elizabeth Parsons on November 4, 1876, who died on April 8, 1878, and then Minnie A. Booth in Milwaukee on November 4, 1878.

As a young woman, Peyton gave recitals and sang at social gatherings, church events, and G.A.R. functions organized by her father. She attended Northwestern University and later married a local physician, with her social activities regularly noted in Milwaukee newspaper society pages. It was the encouragement of actor Otis Skinner that prompted her to leave that life behind and travel to New York in the summer of 1900 to pursue a theatrical career, a decision her father opposed so strongly that he threatened to disinherit her.

Peyton's stage debut came in a minor role in Prince Otto, a romantic melodrama Skinner adapted from the Robert Louis Stevenson novel. The production opened at Wallack's Theatre on September 3, 1900, and ran for 40 performances over five weeks. Her next appearance was as Lady Fitz-Herbert in Tom Moore, a fictionalized drama about a young Thomas More written by Theodore Burt Sayre, which opened at the Herald Square Theatre on August 31, 1901, and closed on October 5 after 40 performances. In 1902, she took on the role of the adventuress Kate Van Dyke in Ramsay Morris' The Ninety and Nine, a melodrama loosely based on the hymn by Ira D. Sankey. That production opened at the Academy of Music on October 7, 1902, and ran for 128 performances before closing on January 24, 1903.

On August 27, 1903, Peyton opened alongside William Collier, Sr. in Eugène Presbrey's society comedy Personal at the Republic Theatre in Rochester, New York, before the play moved to New York's Bijou Theatre for a 38-performance engagement. Later that year and into 1904, she joined the cast of Augustus Thomas' comedy The Earl of Pawtucket, supporting Lawrence D'Orsay in what critics considered a well-matched pairing. Writing in The Critic in 1904, Zona Gale noted that in Peyton, D'Orsay's production had at last found a leading woman whose beauty, distinction, and ability promised large things.

In the early summer of 1905, Peyton took the role of Mrs. Kate Brandon in Paul Armstrong's comedy The Heir to the Hoorah at the Hudson Theatre, continuing with the production when it moved to Boston's Hollis Street Theatre that fall and through the subsequent national tour. The following year she appeared in Rachel Crothers' The Three of Us, playing Mrs. Tweed Dix opposite Carlotta Nillson's Rhy Macchesney. That play opened at the Madison Square Theatre on October 17, 1906, and ran for 227 performances, continuing into May 1907. In J. Hartley Manners' The Great John Ganton, an adaptation of the novel by Arthur Jerome Eddy, Peyton played Mrs. Jack Wilton to George Fawcett's title character. The production opened on May 3, 1909, at the Lyric Theatre and closed the following month after 40 performances. Her Broadway credits also included We Are Seven, The Sea Woman, The Worth of a Man, and other productions. In William C. De Mille's drama The Woman, she played Grace, wife of Judge Jim Blake as portrayed by John W. Cope. That production concluded a season-long run of 247 performances at the Theatre Republic on April 19, 1912.

Peyton's personal life was marked by several marriages. She had wed Milwaukee physician Dr. Robert Curtis Brown at her father's residence on October 26, 1892, but her departure for New York in 1900 led to an uncontested divorce granted to Brown in July 1902 on grounds of desertion. She next married Arthur Cecil Gordon Weld, musical director at the Casino Theatre and former musical director of the Florodora Company, in a ceremony held at the Hotel Walton in Philadelphia on May 22, 1903, as Weld could not legally remarry in New York. That marriage ended in divorce on October 23, 1907. On August 21, 1907, she had married actor Guy Bates Post, the star of The Heir to the Hoorah and former husband of Sarah Truax, though on February 16, 1915, Peyton and Post were granted an annulment on the grounds that she had still been legally married to Weld at the time of their wedding, as her final divorce decree had not yet taken effect. On March 11, 1915, at the residence of her friend Josephine Wright Chapman, Peyton married the writer Samuel Hopkins Adams. That marriage lasted more than 30 years and ended only with her death, at the age of 75, in Auburn, New York, on September 8, 1946.