Mace Greenleaf

Mace Greenleaf (December 8, 1872 – March 23, 1912) was an American actor who worked in both stage and silent film. Born in Dixfield, Maine, he was the only child of Charles Ward Greenleaf and Mary Stanley Greenleaf, née Eustis. His father, a Massachusetts native, worked as a surveyor to support the family.

Greenleaf's professional stage career gained early traction in the late 1890s through stock productions of The Prisoner of Zenda and its companion piece Rupert of Hentzau, in which he took on the role of Herbert, the king's forester. His Broadway debut came in November 1898, when he appeared as Mr. Hunston in Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's Trelawny of the "Wells," which opened at the Lyceum Theatre in New York on November 22 of that year. He returned to Broadway in 1900 for The Pride of Jennico, staged at the Criterion Theatre alongside James K. Hackett and Bertha Galland. Later that same year, Greenleaf appeared in a road production of The Parish Priest with Daniel Sully, playing the role of Myrtle May's lover.

Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, Greenleaf performed leading roles in stock companies across both coasts and the American interior. He came back to Broadway in 1905 to portray the Prince of Wales in the romantic musical Edmund Burke, completing his Broadway career, which had spanned from 1898 to 1905. In 1911, he transitioned into the motion picture industry and appeared in at least eighteen films during the final year of his life.

In September 1906, Greenleaf married Lucy, also known as Lucie, Banning in Santa Ana, California. Banning came from a prominent wealthy family that owned Catalina Island and had previously been at the center of a public scandal when an affair she conducted while still married to her first husband ended in the suicide of her lover. She separated from Greenleaf in 1910, leaving him for the son of a prominent judge. Greenleaf died on March 23, 1912, in Philadelphia following a brief illness caused by pneumonia.