Selina Dolaro

Selina Simmons Belasco Dolaro (20 August 1849 – 23 January 1889) was an English singer, actress, theatre manager, and writer active during the late Victorian era. Born in London to Jewish parents, her father Benjamin Simmons was a violinist and conductor, and her mother was Julia, née Lewis. Dolaro received early musical instruction from her father's colleagues before attending the Paris Conservatory as a teenager. In 1865, at sixteen, she married Isaac Dolaro Belasco, an Italian Jew of Spanish descent, in Upper Kennington; the couple had four children, among them the actress Genevieve Belasco (1872–1956). They divorced in 1873, after which Dolaro raised her two sons and two daughters independently. By 1870 she had adopted Dolaro as her professional name.

Dolaro made her stage debut at the Lyceum Theatre in 1870, playing the Spanish princess Galsuinda in Hervé's operetta Chilpéric, and subsequently appeared there in Offenbach operettas. A season at the Gaiety Theatre followed, and in 1871 she toured with Fred Sullivan's Operetta Company in an English-language Offenbach adaptation called Breaking the Spell. In 1872 she performed as a leading player in H. B. Farnie's English-language adaptation of Offenbach's Geneviève de Brabant, in Hervé's Doctor Faust, and in a burlesque of Ferdinand Hérold's Zampa. That same period she appeared in the title role of Bizet's Carmen in the first English-language production of that opera, staged by the Carl Rosa Opera Company, with Durward Lely opposite her as Don José.

By January 1875, Dolaro had become director of the Royalty Theatre in London, where her father served as musical director. She starred as the title character in Offenbach's La Périchole during that tenure. Her theatre manager, Richard D'Oyly Carte, commissioned Trial by Jury from W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan as a replacement afterpiece to La Périchole. Sullivan conducted the opening night performance on 25 March 1875, though Dolaro's father generally led the orchestra for the remainder of the initial run, which closed on 12 June 1875. Dolaro is notably remembered as the producer of that original production. Between June and October 1875 she took her Madame Selina Dolaro's Comic Opera Co. on tour while the theatre was closed for the summer. She returned to the Royalty in January 1876, again collaborating with Carte, and played Malvina in The Duke's Daughter. She continued performing in London and on tour, appearing at the Alhambra Theatre in 1877, and in 1879 she both performed at and managed the Folly Theatre.

Dolaro traveled to the United States in the autumn of 1879, appearing in October at the Academy of Music in New York City in the title role of Carmen, though critical reception was mixed. She joined a touring comic opera company before returning to London, where in 1880 she appeared at the Globe Theatre as Cerisette in Farnie and Genée's The Naval Cadets. She subsequently relocated to New York for several seasons of comic opera work. Operating under Carte's agency, she appeared at the Standard Theatre in 1882 as Girola in Bucalossi's Les Manteaux Noirs, as Katrina in Robert Planquette's Rip van Winkle, and as the Fairy Queen in Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe. That same year she played the title role in Olivette at the Bijou Opera House, which constitutes her credited Broadway appearance of 1881. In 1883, following a published opinion piece by Reverend Philip Germond condemning theatrical life as godless, Dolaro publicly defended her profession in the New York Herald, arguing that her career had provided the means to educate and support her children.

Her final role was Minnie Marden in an adaptation of Victorien Sardou's Agnes in 1886. Her last public appearance came in May 1888 at Daly's Theatre in New York, where she performed as a supernumerary in a benefit production of Hamlet for Lester Wallack. Following her performance in Agnes, Dolaro's health deteriorated as she struggled with tuberculosis. She died of a stroke in New York City in January 1889 at the age of thirty-nine and was buried at Beth Olam Cemetery in New York City.

Beyond performance, Dolaro was a prolific writer. Her play In the Fashion, later known simply as Fashion, ran in New York between 1887 and 1888, and she also wrote a play called Justine. Her collection Mes amours: Poems, Passionate and Playful, drawn from love letters she had received, was published in 1888. She co-authored the novel The Princess Daphne with Edward Heron-Allen, published by Belford, Clarke and Co. in 1888, a tale involving mesmerism, doppelgangers, and metempsychosis. Two further novels, Bella Demonia and The Vengeance of Maurice Denalguez, were ghost-written for her by Heron-Allen and published posthumously around 1889.