Lillian Lorraine

Lillian Lorraine, born Lillian Jacques in either 1892 or 1894, was an American stage and screen actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1908 to 1922. Her birthplace is a matter of conflicting records: the U.S. census of 1900 lists Utah as her place of birth, while Lorraine herself told a journalist she had been born in San Francisco on New Year's Day in 1892 and had lived there for her first fourteen years, a claim accepted by her official biographer, Nils Hanson. That same census recorded her residing in Leadville, Colorado, at her maternal step-grandfather's hotel, alongside her parents, Mollie and Charles Jacques. Her father was a miner with roots in St. Louis, and her mother's maiden name may have been Mary Ann Brennan.

Lorraine began performing on stage in 1906 at the age of twelve or fourteen. The following year she appeared as a minor performer in the Shubert production The Tourists, where she was discovered by producer Florenz Ziegfeld. Ziegfeld devoted the next several years to advancing her career, elevating her into one of the most prominent attractions in his Follies productions. In 1909, he pulled the teenaged Lorraine from the chorus line of Miss Innocence to feature her as a solo performer, and she became celebrated for introducing the song "By the Light of the Silvery Moon" in that production. She went on to appear in many annual editions of the Ziegfeld Follies throughout the 1910s, as well as the 1912 Broadway musical Over the River. Her other Broadway credits include The Blue Kitten, Ziegfeld Girls of 1920, and The Little Blue Light.

Alongside her stage work, Lorraine ventured into motion pictures with limited success, appearing in approximately ten films between 1912 and 1922, among them the serial Neal of the Navy with William Courtleigh, Jr. Although her romantic involvement with Ziegfeld had ended by the close of the 1910s, her continued box-office appeal kept her working in several of his productions during that period. Her fame began to diminish in the 1920s, and she subsequently worked in vaudeville for a time.

Lorraine's personal life attracted considerable public attention throughout her career. Her turbulent romances and feuds with contemporaries such as Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker made her a frequent subject of newspaper coverage. Her relationship with Ziegfeld was both professionally and romantically complex; author Lee Davis, in his book Scandals and Follies, wrote that by 1911 Ziegfeld was deeply in love with Lorraine and remained so to some degree for the rest of his life. The relationship was widely reported to have contributed to the end of Ziegfeld's involvement with Anna Held, and Ziegfeld's second wife, actress Billie Burke, acknowledged that Lorraine was the only figure from his past who aroused her jealousy.

Lorraine's marital history was equally turbulent. She married Frederick M. Gresheimer on March 27, 1912, after the two met on a beach, but announced ten days later that the marriage had been a mistake. The union was subsequently found to be invalid because Gresheimer had not divorced his first wife. The two remarried in May 1913, though Lorraine filed for annulment three months later, claiming Gresheimer had misrepresented himself. Around 1946, she reportedly wed Jack O'Brien, an accountant, though her biographer Nils Hanson found no official record of the marriage and concluded it was likely common-law.

Lorraine disappeared from public view in 1941, at times using the name Mary Ann Brennan, her mother's purported maiden name. She died on April 17, 1955, in New York City, at the age of either 61 or 63. Her funeral was held at Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church and was attended by Jack O'Brien and two friends. She was initially buried in a pauper's grave at Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York; her remains were later exhumed and reinterred in a friend's family plot at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx. The first biography devoted to her life, Lillian Lorraine: The Life and Times of a Ziegfeld Diva by Nils Hanson, was published in October 2011 by McFarland Press. Lorraine was portrayed by Valerie Perrine in the 1978 Columbia Pictures film Ziegfeld: The Man and His Women, and she is referenced as an acquaintance of characters in Jennifer Egan's 2017 novel Manhattan Beach.