Valeska Suratt

Valeska Suratt (June 28, 1882 – July 2, 1962) was an American stage actress and silent film performer whose Broadway career spanned from 1906 to 1922. Born in Owensville, Indiana, to Ralph and Anna (née Matthews) Suratt, she was the granddaughter of French immigrants on her father's side and English immigrants on her mother's side. She had an older brother, a younger sister, and one stepsister. When Suratt was six years old, her family relocated to Terre Haute, Indiana. She left school in 1899 and took a position at a photographer's studio before later moving to Indianapolis, where she worked as a millinery assistant at a department store.

Suratt launched her performing career on the Chicago stage and transitioned into vaudeville around 1900. She partnered with comedian Billy Gould, whose legal name was William J. Flannery (1869–1950), and the two developed a successful act that incorporated an Apache dance. The pair married around 1904. Suratt made her Broadway debut in 1906 in the musical The Belle of Mayfair, and the following year she appeared in the musical Hip! Hip! Hooray! By 1908, Suratt and Gould had separated professionally, and their marriage ended in divorce in 1911. Suratt then built a solo vaudeville act centered on singing and dancing performed in elaborate costumes and gowns, eventually billing herself as "Vaudeville's Greatest Star" and "The Biggest Drawing Card in New York." In 1910, she appeared in The Girl with the Whooping Cough, a production that New York City mayor William Jay Gaynor deemed salacious and ordered shut down due to its sexually suggestive content. That December, she joined actor Fletcher Norton in a production called Bouffe Variety; the two married shortly thereafter, though Norton was granted a divorce after only eight weeks, on July 16, 1911. Suratt became known during this period for performing in playlets spanning comedies and melodramas.

Throughout her stage career, Suratt was widely recognized for the extravagant fashions she wore in performance. Her name became associated with lavish gowns internationally, and one item that drew particular attention was an $11,000 Cinderella cloak. She was sometimes referred to as the "Empress of Fashions," and Vogue magazine named her one of the best-dressed women on the stage, regularly publishing detailed descriptions of her costumes. She has also been cited as a possible model for the Gibson Girl illustrations.

In 1915, Suratt signed a contract with Fox Film Corporation, where she was marketed alongside contract players such as Theda Bara and Virginia Pearson as a vamp — cast in seductive and exotic roles. Her film debut came that year in The Soul of Broadway, in which she reportedly wore more than 150 gowns, each costing $25,000. She followed that with The Immigrant (1915), The Straight Way (1916), Jealousy (1916), The Victim (1916), The New York Peacock (1916), and She (1917). Suratt appeared in eleven silent films in total, all of which are now considered lost, largely as a result of the 1937 Fox vault fire. She departed from films in 1917.

Suratt returned to Broadway in the early 1920s, appearing in The Red Rose and the musical Spice of 1922. By that time, however, her career had begun to decline as both vaudeville and the vamp archetype fell out of favor with audiences. In 1928, Suratt and scholar Mirza Ahmad Sohrab filed suit against Cecil B. DeMille, alleging that he had appropriated their scenario for The King of Kings. The case went to trial in February 1930 and was ultimately settled without public resolution. Having left films in 1917, Suratt appeared to be unofficially blacklisted following the lawsuit.

By the close of the 1920s, Suratt had largely disappeared from public life. She was later found living in a cheap New York City hotel with no financial resources. Novelist Fannie Hurst organized a benefit on her behalf that raised approximately $2,000, but Suratt returned penniless within weeks, having spent the money gambling. An attempt to sell her life story to one of William Randolph Hearst's newspapers did not result in publication; a reporter who reviewed the manuscript noted that Suratt had written that she was the Virgin Mary and the mother of God. She never returned to the stage or to film.

Suratt was a member of the Baháʼí Faith. She married twice and had no children. She died on July 2, 1962, in a nursing home in Washington, D.C., at the age of 80, and is interred at Highland Lawn Cemetery in Terre Haute, Indiana.