Rose Stahl

Rose Stahl, born Rosalie Stahl on October 29, 1868, in Montreal, Canada, and died July 16, 1955, was a Canadian-born American stage actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1899 to 1916. Her father, Col. Ernest Karl Stahl, was a Prussian-born newspaperman who served as drama and music critic for the Chicago InterOcean, and her mother, Catherine McDonald, was born in Canada to a Scottish father and an Irish mother. Stahl spent her formative years in Chicago before relocating to Trenton, New Jersey, when her father took on the editorship of the Trenton Herald. Her father, a widower, died in 1921 in a New York City hospital at the age of 77, survived by Stahl, her sister, and three brothers.

Stahl made her professional debut in Philadelphia in 1887, toured with Daniel E. Bandmann in 1888, and first appeared in New York City in 1897. Between 1902 and 1903, she starred as Janice Meredith in a touring production of the play of the same name. In 1904, she originated the role of Patricia O'Brien in a sketch called The Chorus Girl, which she subsequently brought to London in 1906. She returned to New York in a revised four-act version retitled The Chorus Lady, one of her Broadway credits, in which she made a considerable impression. Though she had remained largely unknown to theatergoing audiences until that point, by 1907 she had drawn comparisons to David Warfield. Critics praised her as a comedienne with an exquisite sense of humor and noted the naturalness of her performances. Later that year she performed in Lexington, Kentucky for the first time.

Her Broadway work also included Moonlight Mary and the 1911 production of Maggie Pepper, in which she starred. Critic Percy Hammond, writing for the Chicago Tribune, regarded Maggie Pepper as neither a strong play nor compelling entertainment, but credited Stahl's performance in the lead role as making it worthwhile. In 1914, she took on the role of Lucille Higgins in A Perfect Lady, another of her Broadway credits. The Reading Times noted that no one on the stage possessed quite the plaintive voice characteristic of Stahl, and observed that she had not been taken seriously as a performer a decade earlier.

Like David Warfield, Stahl concentrated her career on a select number of plays, becoming closely identified with them over many years. When film studios began recruiting stage stars around 1912, Stahl showed no interest in the new medium.

Stahl was married twice. Her first husband was E.P. Sullivan, an actor known for starring in The Black Crook, from whom she divorced in the mid-1890s. On October 17, 1895, she married her second husband, actor William Bonelli, in Hudson, New Jersey, a union that lasted until Bonelli's death. She had no children from either marriage.

A photograph of Stahl as a child, holding a doll, appears in Daniel Blum's 1954 edition of Great Stars of the American Stage. The same image was used in the 1980 film Somewhere in Time, in which Christopher Reeve portrayed a journalist researching an Edwardian actress.