Stella Mayhew

Stella Mayhew, born Izetta Estelle Sadler on November 19, 1874, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was an American actress and vaudeville performer whose Broadway career extended from 1904 to 1930. Her father worked as a teacher and school principal, and she began acting as a child in Grafton, Ohio.

Mayhew's early stage work included a prominent role in blackface as "Aunt Lindy" in On the Suwanee River, which established a performance style she would return to in subsequent productions. Her Broadway appearances began in 1904 with multiple productions, including Flo Flo, The Show Girl, and The Man from China, followed by Fritz in Tammany Hall, Lifting the Lid, and The Whole Damm Family in 1905, and Comin' Through the Rye in 1906. She appeared again in blackface in The Jolly Bachelors in 1910. Her revue credits included La Belle Paree in 1911 and The Whirl of Society in 1912, both performed in blackface and both featuring Al Jolson. She also appeared alongside Jolson in the musical comedy Vera Violetta in 1911. A World of Pleasure followed in 1915, and A Mix-Up in 1916. Her later Broadway work encompassed the musicals Lace Petticoat and Hit the Deck, both in 1927, the play Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh in 1929, and the revue Hello, Paris in 1930.

Beyond the stage, Mayhew appeared in short films, including episodes of the serials Our Mutual Girl in 1914 and The Hallelujah Lady in 1929, and was reported in 1919 to be launching her own film production company. She also made multiple musical recordings, among them a 1909 Edison cylinder recording of "I'm Looking for Something to Eat," which has since been digitized.

Mayhew's activities extended into charitable work. She sang at a 1910 benefit for the Sanitarium for Poor Children at Rockaway Park, and after performing at a 1913 fundraiser for a firemen's pension fund, she was named Third Assistant Chief of the New Rochelle Fire Department.

In her personal life, Mayhew was married to singer and composer Billie Taylor; the couple divorced in 1922. The stock market crash of 1929 cost her both her house in Beechhurst, New York, and her life savings. She died on May 2, 1934, at the age of 59, in the National Vaudeville Artists' Ward at French Hospital, from sepsis following an ankle injury sustained at the Times Square subway station. Funeral arrangements, funded by the National Variety Artists Association, were conducted in the Roman Catholic tradition, into which Mayhew had been baptized in her final days.