Laura Nelson Hall

Laura Nelson Hall, born Laura Barnhurst on July 11, 1876, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was an American actress whose career spanned theater, vaudeville stock companies, and early silent film. She made her stage debut on September 13, 1897, with the Girard Avenue Stock Company in Philadelphia, appearing in a production called Our Friends. The following year she took a supporting role in the original production of The Moth and the Flame alongside Herbert Kelcey and Effie Shannon, a bit part that attracted significant attention and brought her to the notice of manager Augustin Daly. Under Daly's management, Hall secured more substantial roles, including parts in The Great Ruby and An Enemy to the King, as well as a spot on a national tour of The Purple Lady.

Her early New York work included Sydney Rosenfeld's farce The Two Escutcheons, which enjoyed an unusually long run at the Bijou Theatre in 1899. Hall then traveled west, performing with the Ralph Cummings Stock Company on the Pacific Coast and at the Grand Opera House in San Francisco between 1900 and 1901, where she supported performers including Joseph Haworth, Edwin Arden, Walter Perkins, and Minnie Seligman. Returning east, she appeared in Paul Armstrong's drama St. Ann before taking a lengthy engagement with the Empire Stock Company in Columbus, Ohio.

In January 1904, Hall's husband, the actor Ned Howard Fowler, died by suicide in Columbus. Fowler shot himself in the presence of Hall and her personal physician, Dr. Starling Wilcox, who had been summoned because Fowler was suffering from extreme nervous exhaustion due to overwork. The couple had recently married after joining the Empire Stock Company together. Hall returned to work shortly afterward, becoming a leading lady with the Arden Stock Company in Washington, D.C., before moving to New Orleans, Louisiana, where she performed with the Grand Opera House Stock Company. In October 1905 she appeared in a production of A Modern Magdalene, playing the role of Katinka, and received praise from the New Orleans Times-Picayune for her performance.

Hall's return to New York in 1907 marked the beginning of her Broadway career in earnest. In November of that year, The Coming of Mrs. Patrick opened at the Madison Square Theatre on 24th Street, with Hall in the title role, to strongly positive local reviews. In 1908, Daly's Theatre presented Girls, based on a play by Alexander Engel and Julius Horst and written by Clyde Fitch, in which Hall was part of the original cast playing Pamela Gordon before being replaced by Bessie Toner. That same year she appeared in The Sins of Society at the New York Theatre. In 1909 she originated the role of Elfie St. Clair in Eugene Walter's The Easiest Way, directed by David Belasco at the Stuyvesant Theatre, a production she reprised in 1921 at the Lyceum Theatre under Belasco's direction once more.

In 1910, Hall appeared in Children of Destiny, another Sydney Rosenfeld composition, at the Savoy Theatre at 112 West 34th Street in Manhattan. That same year she was part of the cast of New York, a three-act drama written by William J. Hurlbut and produced by A. H. Woods, which premiered at the Garrick Theatre in Philadelphia in September 1910 before moving to the Columbia Theater in Washington, D.C. and subsequently to the Bijou Theatre in New York. The first production of Everywoman, written by Walter Browne with music by George Whitefield Chadwick, opened at the Herald Square Theatre in February 1911, with Hall in the cast alongside Patricia Collinge and Wilda Bennett.

Further Broadway credits included The Poor Little Rich Girl in 1913 at the Hudson Theatre, where she played the Mother in Eleanor Gates's play produced by Arthur Hopkins; What It Means to a Woman in 1914 at the Longacre Theatre; Her Honor, the Mayor in 1918 at the Fulton Theatre; the musical Poor Little Ritz Girl; and The Survival of the Fittest in 1921 at the Greenwich Village Theatre, in which she played Katherine Willard in George Atkinson's play.

Hall also appeared in two silent films produced in the New York area. She played Mrs. Binkley in Dope in 1914, based on a play by Joseph Medill Patterson, which was shot at the Thanhouser studios in New Rochelle, New York. The following year she appeared in The Stubbornness of Geraldine, directed by Gaston Mervale and based on the play by Clyde Fitch. Hall died on her 60th birthday, July 11, 1936, in New Rochelle, New York.