Vera Michelena

Vera Michelena (June 16, 1885 – August 28, 1961) was an American actress, contralto prima donna, and dancer whose career spanned light opera, musical comedy, vaudeville, and silent film. Born in New York City, she was the daughter of Fernando Michelena (1858–1921), a Venezuelan lyric tenor of Spanish descent, and Frances Lenord (1867–1912), an operatic soprano and pianist. Her sister Beatriz Michelena became a celebrated silent film actress, and her half-sister Teresa Michelena, known professionally as Donna Borrell, was also an actress. Both Vera and Beatriz received their musical and dramatic training from their father, who had toured extensively with the Emma Abbott Grand Opera Company. Michelena attended school at a convent in San Miguel, California. Fernando Michelena later settled in San Francisco, where he taught voice and eventually served as president of Arrillaga Musical College. His methods and stage experience informed his daughter's approach to performance, and his influence on vocal pedagogy was later documented by Californian writer Maria Antonia Field in Five Years of Vocal Study under Fernando Michelena.

Michelena launched her professional theatrical career in the fall of 1902 in a national tour of the Kirke La Shelle comic opera The Princess Chic, initially in a minor role. On January 19, 1903, at the Columbia Theatre in San Francisco, she assumed the title role of The Princess Chic of Normandy, a position she held for the remainder of that season and the next. During the 1904–05 season she starred as Zaidee in the Harry B. Smith musical comedy The Jewel of Asia, and the following season she appeared in two road productions: The School Girl, in which she played Lillian Leigh, and The Yankee Consul, in which she played Bonita.

Her New York debut came in August 1906 at the Majestic Theatre, where she played Princess Cholulu in the R.H. Burnside and Gustave Kerker musical comedy The Tourist. A New York Times reviewer singled out her rendition of the song "They Lived to Be Loved in Vain" for special mention. Early in 1907 she appeared in Boston and Philadelphia as Ariella in The Snow Man, a musical comedy by Reginald De Koven and Hugh Stanislaus Stange, which reached Broadway that November under the title The Girls of Holland. On January 13, 1908, she opened at the Casino Theatre in Funabashi, a musical comedy by Irvin S. Cobb and Safford Water inspired by a trip to Asia by then Secretary of War William H. Taft. The production closed in early February after 32 performances. Michelena then replaced Magda Dahl as Princess Helena in the operetta The Waltz Dream, adapted for the English stage by Joseph W. Herbert from the original Viennese production by Felix Dörmann and Leopold Jacobson. Staged at the Broadway Theatre on West 41st Street, The Waltz Dream ran until May 2, 1908, accumulating 111 performances.

On June 11, 1908, Michelena sailed for England aboard the steamship Blücher for an engagement at London's Palace Theatre and a subsequent visit to France. She returned in early September following a storm-plagued Atlantic crossing aboard the ocean liner New York, in time to prepare for a fall road tour with the Harry B. Smith and Maurice Lévy musical comedy The Soul Kiss. In the spring of 1910, she played to record-breaking audiences at Chicago's LaSalle Theatre in the Mortimer Henry Singer farce musical The Flirting Princess, where she first performed the Vampire Dance alongside dancer Joseph Smith, whose choreography drew on the works of Philip Burne-Jones and Rudyard Kipling. That September she appeared at the Grand Theatre in Chicago in George Broadhurst's musical comedy The Girl and the Drummer, and the following month she shared top billing with Sallie Fisher and Frank Daniels in The Girl on the Train at New York's Globe Theatre, a musical comedy by Harry B. Smith adapted from the original by Viktor Léon and Leo Fall. The production ran through late April 1911 at Boston's Colonial Theatre.

On November 2, 1911, Michelena starred in Alma, Where Do You Live?, the first production staged at the newly remodeled Bucklen Theatre in Elkhart, Indiana. The George V. Hobart and Jean Briquet musical had been among the more popular Broadway offerings of the 1910–11 season. She remained with the production into the spring of 1912 before joining Lew Fields' vaudeville extravaganza Hanky Panky. Michelena was among the principal performers in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1914 during its June-to-September run at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York. She later played the title role in the Fred de Gresac and Silvio Hein musical comedy Flo-Flo over a six-month run at Broadway's Cort Theatre during the 1917–18 season.

In the spring of 1919, Michelena appeared at the 44th Street Theatre in Take It from Me, a musical comedy by Will R. Anderson and Will B. Johnstone that ran for nearly 100 performances. She played Queenie LaBelle, a cinema vampire, and performed the Vampire Dance with Vernon "Soup" Van Dyke, played by Fred Hildebrand. That November she began an eight-week run in the title role of Betty Be Good, a musical comedy by Harry B. Smith and Hugo Riesenfeld, at Boston's Shubert Theatre. Her final major Broadway appearance came as a principal performer in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921. Her Broadway career, which extended from 1906 to 1921, also included the musicals Love Dreams and Take It From Me, as well as her starring roles in Funabashi and The Girls of Holland.

Following her Broadway years, Michelena began the 1922 fall season starring opposite Fred Hillebrand in a vaudeville musical revue called Hello Miss Radio, and in 1924 the two toured together in a vaudeville skit entitled All for Vera. In 1927 they shared top billing in Listen Dearie, a musical comedy by Harold Atteridge and Gertrude Purcell.

Michelena also appeared in at least two silent films, both opposite her then husband Harry Spingler. She played Helen Warner in Driftwood, a family drama produced in March 1916 by the Ocean Film Corporation, adapted from the 1911 Owen Davis play by Anthony Paul Kelly and directed by Marshall Farnum, brother of Dustin Farnum. Her second film, The Devil's Playground, was a social drama produced by Monmouth Films in 1917, directed by Harry McRae Webster, who also shared writing credits with Dallas Tyler.

In her personal life, Michelena was first married to Paul Schindler, a composer and orchestra director whose credits included Tiger Lilly, The Geezer of Geck, The Wizard of Oz, and The Isle of Spice. She divorced Schindler on May 16, 1917, over alleged statutory offences. On April 30, 1918, she married stage and film actor Harry Spingler in a ceremony held in Queens, New York. That marriage ended when Michelena filed for divorce in Los Angeles in February 1921 on grounds of desertion.