Teddie Gerard

Teddie Gerard, born Teresa Cabre on May 2, 1890, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was a singer, dancer, and actress who built a career across stage and screen in the early twentieth century. She died in London on August 31, 1942, at the age of 52, following an extended illness.

Gerard's stage career began in New York City, where she appeared in the chorus of Havana at the Casino Theatre in February 1909. She subsequently became the dancing partner of Harry Pilcer, taking over that role from Gaby Deslys. By August 1920 she was performing in a Flo Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic production on the New Amsterdam Roof in New York City. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s she worked as a singer and dancer in revues staged in London and Paris, appearing in productions that included The Wedding Glide and Eclipse, the latter written by E. Phillips Oppenheim.

Her Broadway credits include The Rat in 1925, a theatrical production drawn from a work by David L'Estrange. The same production was also staged at the Colonial Theatre in London that year. On screen, Gerard appeared in The Cave Girl in 1921, The Seventh Day in 1922, and the earlier British production The Real Thing at Last in 1916.

In her personal life, Gerard married Joseph Raymond, an American theatrical agent, in Newark, New Jersey, in 1908. She was engaged to actor Tom Douglas in 1926. In October 1928 she announced a further engagement, to Captain Archie Grant of the Grenadier Guards, a son of a Scottish laird, with the wedding planned for Effingham, Surrey, where Gerard owned a cottage. That engagement was ended by mutual consent in May 1929. Gerard had fallen seriously ill in March 1929 with an infection of her right lung and was confined to a nursing home in the West End of London, a period of illness that preceded her death in London in 1942.