Nance O'Neil

Nance O'Neil, born Gertrude Lamson on October 8, 1874, in Oakland, California, was an American stage and film actress whose career spanned from the 1890s through the 1930s. The daughter of George Lamson and Arre Findley, she performed in theaters across the United States and internationally before her death on February 7, 1965, at age 90, at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey.

O'Neil made her professional stage debut on October 16, 1893, playing a nun in Sarah at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco. In the years that followed, she built her craft performing across a wide range of venues throughout the American West and Northwest, later recalling that she had appeared in roughly a hundred different roles during that period, spanning everything from soubrette parts to heavier dramatic characters. By 1898 and 1899 she had returned to San Francisco as a headlining star, appearing in The Jewess and The Shadow. At the height of her fame, theater bills and trade publications promoted her as the "American Bernhardt."

Her growing celebrity led to an around-the-world tour that included engagements in Hawaii, Australia, and Egypt, among other locations. Actor, manager, and producer McKee Rankin oversaw those travels and was instrumental in establishing her reputation in Australia. He also arranged her London debut at the Adelphi Theatre on September 1, 1902, in the play Magda. The New York Times covered the performance the following day, noting that O'Neil delivered an intense rendering of the role in the early acts and ultimately drew enthusiastic audience response during the climax of the third act. Two additional London productions that same month, Camille and Elizabeth, Queen of England, fared poorly with English critics. The London Times dismissed the company's Camille as provincial and criticized her work in Elizabeth, Queen of England for lacking tenderness, leading O'Neil to cut short her planned October engagements there.

Her American stage work encompassed a broad range of productions. In 1906 she took on the title role in an adaptation of Leah, the Forsaken, recreating a part previously made famous by Italian actress Adelaide Ristori. Her other stage credits included Trilby, Macbeth, Hedda Gabler, Sappho, The Passion Flower, The Common Standard, The Wanderer, Agnes, and The Front Page, among many others. She also performed in Louisville, Kentucky, alongside actors including Wilton Lackaye, Edmund Breese, William Faversham, Thomas A. Wise, and Harriet MacGibbon, in productions such as Ned McCobb's Daughter and The Big Fight.

O'Neil's Broadway career extended from 1896 to 1935. Her earliest documented New York appearance was in True to Life at the Murray Hill Theatre in Manhattan in 1896. Over the following decades she appeared in numerous Broadway productions, including Bitter Oleander, The House of Women, Fog-Bound, and Night in the House, the last of which played at the Booth Theatre in 1935.

In addition to her stage work, O'Neil pursued a film career beginning with silent pictures made at studios in New York and New Jersey. Her early screen credits include the 1915 drama The Kreutzer Sonata and the 1916 five-reel production The Witch, both filmed at Fox Film Corporation's facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey. She later made a successful transition to sound films, appearing in Ladies of Leisure, The Royal Bed, and The Rogue Song in 1930, followed by Cimarron and Transgression in 1931, and the 1932 medical drama False Faces, which was her final film.

In 1916, O'Neil married British-born film actor Alfred Hickman, born Alfred Scott Devereaux-Hickman, who had previously been married to actress Blanche Walsh. The same year they wed, O'Neil and Hickman costarred in The Witch, and in 1917 they appeared together again in The Fall of the Romanoffs, portraying Emperor Nicholas II of Russia and Empress Alexandra. Their marriage lasted until Hickman's death in 1931.

O'Neil is also noted for her friendship with acquitted murder suspect Lizzie Borden, whom she met in Boston in 1904. The relationship attracted considerable public gossip. That connection has since been explored in several works, including the musical Lizzie Borden: A Musical Tragedy in Two Axe, in which a character representing O'Neil was played by Suellen Vance; the 2010 play Nance O'Neil by David Foley; and the 2006 novel Miss Lizzie by Walter Satterthwait. O'Neil also appears as a character in William Norfolk's play The Lights are Warm and Colored, set in 1905, which uses Lizzie Borden's friendship with O'Neil and other theatrical figures as the basis for a play within a play.

Following her death in Englewood, O'Neil's ashes were transported to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, where they were placed in the park's columbarium alongside the cinerary urn of her husband Alfred Hickman.