Julia Arthur

Julia Arthur, born Ida Lewis on May 3, 1869, in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, was a Canadian-born stage and film actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1893 to 1921. She was the eldest of nine children born to Thomas J. Lewis, a tobacco manufacturer, and Elizabeth Arthur Lewis. Her younger sister, Eleanor Letitia Lewis, also pursued an acting career under the stage name Eleanor Dorel.

Lewis began performing at the age of eleven in 1879, taking the role of Gamora in The Honeymoon during amateur theatricals held in her own home. Her professional debut followed in 1880 with the Daniel E. Bandmann repertoire company, in which she played the Prince of Wales in Richard III. From that point forward she performed under the name Julia Arthur, combining the given name Julia with her mother's maiden name. By age twelve she had advanced to leading woman status within the Bandmann company, taking on roles including Ophelia, Juliet, Portia, Lady Macbeth, and Lady Anne in Richard III. She remained with the company until 1884, after which she spent a year studying in Germany. Returning in 1885, she joined a repertoire company in California, where she appeared in leading female roles across numerous productions including The Galley Slave, Called Back, Two Orphans, Captain Swift, The Silver King, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, among others.

Arthur achieved her first significant New York success at the Union Square Theatre in February 1892, playing the Queen in The Black Masque, a stage adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death by Frederick Giles. The performance established her reputation, and within weeks she joined A.M. Palmer's stock company as its leading woman. With that company she played Jeanne in The Broken Seal, Letty Fletcher in Saints and Sinners, and Lady Windermere in Lady Windermere's Fan, the last of which marked her Broadway debut on February 5, 1893. Her most celebrated work with the company came in Mercedes, a short play by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, whose author was sufficiently impressed to present her with the full rights to the production. Her second Broadway appearance came in Sister Mary, which ran from May 15 to 29, 1894.

Later in 1894 Arthur traveled to England, where she made her London debut on February 1, 1895, at Sir Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre, performing alongside Ellen Terry. Her roles there included Elaine in King Arthur, Sophia in Olivia, Queen Anne in Richard III, Rosamond in Becket, and Imogene in Cymbeline, the last of which was widely regarded as her greatest performance. She subsequently toured the United States with the Irving-Terry company and, upon her return in 1896, resolved to perform the following season under her own management. On November 1, 1897, she brought Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Lady of Quality to Broadway, herself taking the role of Clorinda Wildairs. On October 3, 1898, she appeared as Parthenia in her own production of Ingomar, and on November 28, 1898, she produced As You Like It at Wallack's in New York City, where her portrayal of Rosalind was considered among the finest seen on the American stage. Arthur returned to Broadway on October 24, 1899, in More Than Queen, which ran through November of that year. Her talent manager during this period was Napier Lothian Jr.

On February 23, 1898, Arthur married Benjamin Pierce Cheney Jr., the only son of a wealthy Boston expressman, in a ceremony held in Covington, Kentucky. The couple made their primary home in Boston and maintained a summer estate on Calf Island. They were patrons of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, to which they donated a number of antiquities. The couple had no children. After 1929 their circumstances were reduced owing to financial reverses, and Benjamin P. Cheney Jr. died on June 10, 1942, near Kingman, Arizona.

Alongside her stage work, Arthur pursued a career in silent film beginning in 1908, when she appeared in Barbara Frietchie: The Story of a Patriotic American Woman for Vitagraph Studios under director J. Stuart Blackton. She performed in ten films in total, the majority of them directed by Blackton. Her other screen credits include Ruy Blas, King Lear, The Life of Napoleon, Napoleon the Man of Destiny, The Life of Moses, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, all from 1909 or 1910. In 1918 director John G. Adolfi cast her as Edith Cavell in The Woman the Germans Shot. Her final screen appearance came in 1919 in The Common Cause, a benefit film produced by the Stage Women's War Relief Fund to aid victims of World War I.

Arthur's Broadway appearances continued into the following decade. The Eternal Magdalene, in which she starred, opened on November 1, 1915, and ran through January 1916. She served as director, producer, and star of Seremonda, which ran on Broadway from January 1917 through March of that year. On May 17, 1918, she revived Out There on Broadway, where it continued through the end of that month. Her final Broadway appearance came in Macbeth, which opened on February 17, 1921, and ran into March, with Arthur playing Lady Macbeth opposite Lionel Barrymore. It was later reported that she had come out of retirement due to her husband's financial difficulties. Julia Arthur died in Boston on March 28, 1950.