Mabel Love

Mabel Love, born Mabel Watson on 16 October 1874 in Folkestone, England, was a British dancer and stage actress whose career extended across the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. She died on 15 May 1953 at Weybridge, Surrey, at the age of 78. Her grandfather was William Edward Love, an entertainer and ventriloquist, and her mother was actress Kate Watson. One of three daughters, her sister Blanche Watson was also an actress.

Love began performing at the age of twelve at the Prince of Wales Theatre, where she played The Rose in the first stage adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. In 1887, she took on the role of one of the triplet children in Masks and Faces at London's Opera Comique, and that same year appeared in the Christmas pantomime at Covent Garden. By 1888, still only fourteen, she had joined George Edwardes's Burlesque Company at the Gaiety Theatre, where she played Totchen, the vivandière, in Faust Up To Date, a run that lasted through 1889 and brought her considerable public attention.

In March 1889, The Star newspaper ran a story under the headline "Disappearance of a Burlesque Actress," reporting that Love had gone to the Thames Embankment in a state of distress. The coverage increased public interest in her rather than diminishing it. When photographer Frank Foulsham began selling images of actresses on postcards, Love became a popular subject, earning her the description "the pretty girl of the postcard" from one contemporary writer. In 1894, Winston Churchill wrote to her requesting a signed photograph.

Over the following decades, Love appeared in a succession of burlesques, pantomimes, and musical comedies. Her stage roles included Francoise in La Cigale and Pepita in Ivan Caryll's Little Christopher Columbus. She also performed at the Folies Bergère in Paris. In 1912, she brought her career to Broadway, appearing as Violet Robinson in Man and Superman. Love retired from the stage in 1918, and in 1926 opened a school of dancing in London. Her sole return to performing came in 1938, when she played Mary Goss in Profit and Loss at the Embassy Theatre.

Love left an illegitimate daughter, Mary Loraine, born in 1913, who died in 1973. Mary worked as a British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War and was married twice, first to Richard Emrys Thomas in 1935, the general manager of the Egyptian State Railways, with whom she had a son, Richard, born in 1936 and died in 2001, and later to BOAC pilot Anthony Loraine in 1948. Love's estate included £2,600 in government bonds left to Mary, though Mary died in poverty in a fire at her flat without knowing the bonds existed.