Louise Paullin

Louise Elizabeth Paullin (1848–18 April 1910), also seen as Louisa Paullin, was an American stage actress born in Biddeford, Maine, the eldest child of James Rue Paullin and Susan Frances Vickery. Both parents were actors, and Paullin made her stage debut at a young age while the family was living in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1855 the family moved to California, and within a year Louise and her brother Edgar were performing song and dance routines in variety companies connected with their father, who brought roughly twenty years of theatrical experience to his management work.

By March 1857 Paullin was appearing with John S. Potter's company at Columbia in the two-act burletta The Spoiled Child, playing her signature character Little Pickle. The following year, prominent San Francisco citizens including E. W. Burr, Thomas O. Larkin, and Samuel Purdy sponsored a benefit performance for her at Maguire's Opera House, where she played Little Eva in a Tom show and was noted for moving audiences to tears. Her early career was interrupted in 1859 when, at age eleven, she ran away with a former employee of her father while aboard a steamer bound from San Francisco to Panama. She was recognized and removed from the vessel at Acapulco and returned to her parents, after which her father announced her withdrawal from the stage. The timing was difficult for the family: James Paullin had recently broken his leg and been left permanently lame, and Paullin's earnings of approximately four dollars a day at the Union Theatre had been a primary source of family income.

She returned to performing by August 1860, playing the slave boy Paul in an early production of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon at the Metropolitan Theatre in Sacramento. She subsequently headlined performances by Pickering and King's Dramatic Troupe at Nevada City and spent the following three years touring California with various minstrel companies, including those managed by Charley Backus, Billy Burch, and Bray and Carl. During this period she continued to reprise Little Eva, and in 1863 her father joined her in the production in the role of Shelby. In 1862, while traveling with the Backus troupe, she was injured when the horses drawing a stage wagon broke loose on a downhill run; she caught her leg in a wheel while attempting to jump clear and was dragged some distance, escaping with serious bruising. Paullin left professional performing upon her marriage in 1865 but remained active as a choir and concert singer in Oakland during the 1870s under her married name.

She returned to the stage in 1880, joining the Emelie Melville Opera Company in San Francisco, where she appeared at the Bush Street Theatre as Donna Antonina in Richard Genée's The Royal Middy, as Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance, and alongside Sylvia Gerrish as Lieutenant Dragonette in The Weathercock. Later that same year she made her Broadway debut as Miss Isabella in William A. Mestayer's three-act musical play The Tourists in a Pullman Palace Car at the Fifth Avenue Theatre.

Under contract with the John A. McCaull Comic Opera Company, Paullin appeared on Broadway in Johann Strauss the younger's operetta The Queen's Lace Handkerchief at the Casino Theatre, which opened in October 1882 as the Casino's inaugural production. Paullin played the King opposite Lily Post as the Queen, with a supporting chorus of sixty and an orchestra of forty. The production toured Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities before returning to the Casino in late December for an additional one hundred and thirty performances. In 1883 she appeared at the Casino alongside Lillian Russell, Madeleine Lucette Ryley, and Digby Bell in the McCaull production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer.

In 1884 Paullin was seen in the adaptation Fantine at the Boston Museum and toured Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania in the Boston-based production Zanita, billed as a Grand Fairy Musical Ballet Spectacle. Returning to California in 1885, she joined William T. Carleton's Opera Company, taking the title role in Genée's Nanon and playing Yum-Yum in The Mikado at the Baldwin Theatre in San Francisco and on subsequent local tour, after which she was replaced in the company by Fanny Rice. That same year, while performing in The Bohemian Girl in Philadelphia, Paullin fainted on stage and lost a purse containing over $1,500. She sued the stage manager of the Carleton Opera Company, Charles Caspar Fais, alleging theft. The case was tried in Philadelphia in 1888 and drew considerable attention in the New York press before the prop man at the theatre confessed to having found and spent the money.

In 1888 Paullin wrote Our Baby's Nurse, a musical comedy adapted from the German, which was produced that year in Philadelphia. In 1889 she starred in the comic opera Ardriell at New York's Union Square Theatre, and in 1897 she appeared as Juliette in The Geisha at Chicago's Columbia Theatre. During the 1880s her image appeared on cigarette cards and was used to endorse products including Burdock Blood Bitters, Lion Coffee, skin care products, and Vin Mariani.

Paullin married twice. Her first husband was Robert Edwin Ogilby, a son of Sir David Ogilby, who had come to California during the Gold Rush and later became a drawing instructor at the University of California. The couple had two daughters, Clara and Edith; Edith pursued an acting career under the name Edith Paullin and was lastly married to Hart O. Berg. In September 1885, described as a widow, Paullin married theatrical agent Henry B. Warner in Manhattan. She died in New York on 18 April 1910, with her estate estimated at $250,000. Warner had died on 28 August of the previous year, and both were cremated at Rosehill in Linden, New Jersey.