Pauline Lord

Pauline Lord (August 13, 1890 – October 11, 1950) was an American stage and film actress born in Hanford, California, to Edward Lord and Sara Foster. After her family relocated to San Francisco, she attended Holy Rosary Academy, where participation in a school play first drew her toward acting. As a child she spent her weekly allowance on Saturday performances at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco, eventually earning small parts in productions there. She later graduated from the Jennie Morrow Long College of Voice and Action.

Lord entered the profession at age thirteen with the Belasco Stock Company, making her debut in Are You a Mason? in the role of a maid. The comedian Nat Goodwin witnessed her performance and encouraged her to seek him out in New York City. Three years later, following the San Francisco Fire, she traveled to New York at sixteen, and Goodwin arranged several tour engagements for her. After being dismissed from her first tour, she performed in New York productions before briefly returning to California. Her Broadway debut came in January 1912, when she originated the role of Ruth Lenox in The Talker, a credit that also appears in her verified stage record. A period of tours and vaudeville work followed before she appeared as Sadie in The Deluge in August 1917, a production directed by Arthur Hopkins.

The defining moment of Lord's career arrived on November 2, 1921, when she took the title role in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie at the Vanderbilt Theatre on Broadway. The production traveled to London, where Lord performed it at the Strand Theatre on April 10, 1923, receiving a half-hour ovation. In 1924 she starred as Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted, and in 1928 she appeared as Nina Leeds in O'Neill's Strange Interlude, a production also documented in her Broadway record. Mary Pickford named her among her favorite stars.

Lord returned to Broadway in 1932 as Abby in Sidney Howard's The Late Christopher Bean. She made her film debut in 1934 playing Mrs. Wiggs in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, followed by A Feather in Her Hat in 1935. Finding little interest in cinema, she returned to the stage, and in January 1936 she played Zenobia in Ethan Frome, Owen and Donald Davis's dramatization of Edith Wharton's novel, another production confirmed in her Broadway record. Her Broadway appearances through 1944 also included Sleep My Pretty One and the comedy The Walrus and the Carpenter. Her final stage appearance came in 1946, when she played Amanda in a touring production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.

In her personal life, Lord married advertising executive Owen B. Winters on April 27, 1929; the couple divorced on October 26, 1931. She died on October 11, 1950, at Champion Memorial Hospital in Alamogordo, New Mexico, of chronic asthma and heart disease.