Mabel Frenyear

Mabel Frenyear was an American actress born on August 25, 1880, to Edward L. Frenyear and Eva Tollman. She built a stage career spanning more than two decades, with Broadway appearances from 1899 to 1922.

Frenyear's Broadway career began with The Girl in the Barracks in 1899. She went on to appear in productions including The Wizard of Oz, Babes in Toyland, The Stronger Sex during the 1908–1909 season, Father and the Boys, Where There's a Will, and The Only Law, all around 1909 and 1910. To prepare for her chorus girl role in The Only Law, she took on chorus work in other productions. Her later Broadway credits included The "Mind-the-Paint" Girl in 1912, Nothing But the Truth in 1916, You Never Can Tell, Kissing Time in 1921, The Importance of Being Oscar in 1921, and Montmartre in 1922. A Minnesota reviewer in 1921 described Frenyear as genuinely attractive and noted that she played her part with spirit, while a 1915 critic took a less favorable view, suggesting that her tendency to shriek lines unintelligibly represented the production's most significant flaw.

Beyond the stage, Frenyear appeared in three silent films. In 1915 she was featured in A Fool There Was, a vehicle starring Theda Bara, and in Tit for Tat, described as a comedy. Her third film, Social Quicksands, released in 1918, was written by Katharine Kavanaugh. Her first visit to Los Angeles in 1914 to pursue film work attracted press attention when she publicly criticized the fashion choices of local women, remarking that while Southern California struck her as a wonderland, the women of Los Angeles dressed terribly.

Frenyear married three times. Her first marriage, to Edward F. Dunn on February 17, 1900, lasted only eight weeks of cohabitation after Dunn sold her jewelry and gambled the proceeds; the couple divorced in 1904. On December 22, 1904, she married Thomas R. Finucane in Chicago, Illinois, though the marriage was almost immediately annulled after both parties acknowledged they had married while intoxicated. In 1911, rumors circulated that Frenyear had wed her co-star Ralph Kellard, a claim both parties dismissed. Her third marriage took place on April 27, 1940, in Chicago, to Harry Young. Her date of death is unknown.