Phoebe Davies

Phoebe Davies (February 7, 1864 – December 4, 1912) was a Welsh-born American stage actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1895 to 1905, most notably encompassing nearly ten seasons and approximately 4,000 performances in the lead role of the Lottie Blair Parker play Way Down East.

Davies was born in Cardigan, Wales, to David and Annie (née Griffiths) Davies. Her father had originally traveled to California during the Gold Rush of 1849 and returned with his family in the early 1870s to work for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company before eventually rising to captain the lighthouse tender Madroño in the Lighthouse Service. While still a student, Davies won an audition with David Belasco, at that time stage manager of the Baldwin Theatre Stock Company in San Francisco, which resulted in an offer to appear in an upcoming production. An illness prevented her from accepting the role, though her professional debut followed shortly afterward as a member of the Oakland California Stock Company.

Her earliest stage appearances included the role of Marie in Adolph Chalet, a play by a local California playwright identified as Cipricio or Ciprico, in a cast that also featured Jeffreys Lewis, Osmond Tearle, and Gerard Eyre. Later that season she received praise for her portrayal of Nadia in a stage adaptation of Jules Verne's novel Michael Strogoff.

Around 1882 Davies joined the Baldwin Theatre Stock Company, where she supported the Italian actor Ernesto Rossi as Regan and the Player Queen in productions of King Lear and Hamlet, and appeared as Lady Angela in Charles Francis Coghlan's The Royal Box, an adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas play Kean. During the same season, actor William Edward Sheridan cast her as Prince Arthur opposite his Baldwin in King John, as Lady Ann in Richard III, and in the title role of Romeo and Juliet opposite his Mercutio. She also appeared with the veteran actor Charles R. Thorne, then seventy-one years old, as Maritana in an adaptation of Jules Massenet's opéra comique Don César de Bazan, and as Hortense alongside Jennie Lee's Little Jo in a stage version of Dickens's Bleak House.

On June 7, 1882, Davies married Joseph R. Grismer, then a lead actor at the Baldwin Theatre, in San Francisco. In September 1883 the two joined a company of Baldwin actors on a tour timed to coincide with county fairs throughout California, performing under the direction of Sam O. Mott. Among the productions was Chispa, written by California playwright Clay M. Greene, in which Davies's portrayal of the title role prompted a theatrical producer to offer her star billing on the New York stage, an opportunity she felt unprepared to accept at the time. The couple subsequently formed the Grismer-Davies Organization and performed throughout California and on tours extending across the western states and Canadian provinces. Their repertoire included Davies as Mercedes in Monte Cristo, adapted by Grismer from Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, and as Pauline in Called Back, drawn from the novel by Hugh Conway and also adapted by Grismer. Additional productions mounted by the organization included Editha's Burglar by Frances Hodgson Burnett; The Midnight Bell by Charles Hale Hoyt, a play later associated with the early career of Maude Adams; the Bartley Campbell play Fairfax; Lights and Shadows by Henry Leslie; The World Against Her and The Wages of Sin, both by Frank Harvey, Sr.; The Tigress by Ramsey Morris; The Long Strike and The Streets of New York by Dion Boucicault, in which Grismer and Davies played Tom Badger and Alida Bloodgood respectively; Lester Wallack's Rosedale; Enoch Arden, based on the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson; and The Calthorpe Case, a melodrama by Arthur Goodrich. On September 12, 1892, the couple's son, Conrad Valentine Grismer, became the first child baptized in the baptismal font that Clay M. Greene had donated to St. John's Episcopal Church in San Francisco.

In 1893 Grismer and Davies launched an extended tour of major cities in the eastern United States, appearing as Captain Harry Ford and Georgia Gwynne in Grismer's original play The New South, a melodrama co-written with Clay M. Greene set in the American South a generation after the Civil War. The play was later adapted as a film in 1916 with Carlyle Blackwell and Ethel Clayton in the principal roles. The couple next appeared together in the Sutton Vane, Sr. play Humanity, as Lt. Bevis Cranbourne and Alma Dunbar, which opened in New York at the Fourteenth Street Theatre on February 4, 1895, a credit listed in Davies's Broadway record as Poor Humanity.

Grismer, together with actor William A. Brady, subsequently purchased the rights to Lottie Blair Parker's Way Down East, a pastoral play set in rural New England. With elaborations by Grismer and Davies in the lead role of Anna Moore opposite Howard Kyle as David Bartlett, the production debuted on September 3, 1897, in Providence, Rhode Island, and made its New York premiere the following month at the Manhattan Theatre. Initially met with a lukewarm reception, the play built steadily in popularity as it toured cities across the country. Over a run of nearly ten seasons encompassing some 4,000 performances, the production was estimated to have netted approximately one million dollars, with Grismer's share placed at around three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Way Down East was subsequently adapted as a motion picture on four occasions between 1908 and 1935. Davies continued touring with the production into 1909 and had planned later that year to appear opposite Arnold Daly in Algernon Boyesen's adaptation of Paul Hervieu's four-act play Know Thyself before falling seriously ill.

Davies died on December 4, 1912, after an extended illness, at her residence in Larchmont, New York, at the age of 48. She was survived by her husband and their son.