Stella Hammerstein

Stella Hammerstein, born Estella Hammerstein on January 2, 1882, in New York City, was an American actress who performed on Broadway between 1902 and 1911 and was sometimes billed under the name Stella Steele. She was the daughter of Oscar Hammerstein I, a German-born composer who built his career in America and was the grandfather of Oscar Hammerstein II, and Malvina Jacobi Hammerstein. Both parents initially resisted her pursuit of acting as a profession. In a 1908 interview with a New York Times reporter, Hammerstein recalled that when she informed her father at age 20 of her intention to enter musical comedy, he responded by placing her over his knee and applying a hairbrush. He eventually came to accept her ambitions.

Hammerstein began her professional career in 1902 when she joined the stock theater company led by Daniel Frohman, making her debut on January 7 of that year in Frocks and Frills. In 1904 she traveled to London to study drama and joined an opera company there, though her stay was cut short when her father summoned her home in order to end a romantic relationship she had formed with a magazine publisher. She returned to London in April 1907 to work with one of the theatrical companies of George Joseph Edwardes. Her aspirations to sing grand opera and become a prima donna were ended in 1908 when a throat specialist employed by her father determined that her vocal cords were too weak for serious operatic work.

Also in 1908, Hammerstein returned to the United States to appear in George M. Cohan's The Yankee Prince, joining the production at its premiere in Hartford, Connecticut. Her Broadway credits across her stage career included Frocks and Frills (1902), Notre Dame (1902), The Blonde in Black (1903), Winsome Winnie (1903), The American Idea (1908), The Yankee Prince (1908), and Everywoman (1911). In 1909 she also appeared in On the Eve at the Hollis Street Theatre in Boston.

In 1912 Hammerstein transitioned into vaudeville, launching that phase of her career with a playlet titled The Tyranny of Fate in Atlantic City. The following year she co-authored Getting the Goods, a play written for the vaudeville stage. She subsequently appeared in several films, including The Ace of Death (1915), Anna Karenina (1915), and Social Hypocrites (1918).

In September 1919, approximately two months after the death of Oscar Hammerstein I, Hammerstein and her sister Rose Hammerstein Tostevin became co-owners of the Hammerstein Amusement Company. A New York State Supreme Court judge ruled that the two sisters were the rightful owners of 4,998 of the company's 5,000 total shares of stock, resolving a legal dispute that had involved the sisters, their father's widow, and a trust company holding the shares as security for alimony payments owed to Oscar Hammerstein's first wife.

On October 5, 1912, Hammerstein married Frederick Lionel Chester Keating, an attorney, in Jersey City. The marriage ended in divorce in March 1920, and on April 1 of that same year she married Charles Fyles Pope, who served as vice-president of the International Doll Association. Stella Hammerstein died on June 7, 1975.