Laura Don

Laura Don
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Born	Anna Laura Fish (1852-02-20)February 20, 1852 Glens Falls, New York
Died	February 10, 1886(1886-02-10) (aged 33) Greenwich, New York
Occupation	Actor-Manager, Artist and Playwright

Laura Don (February 20, 1852 – February 10, 1886) was the pseudonym of Anna Laura Fish, an American actress, stage manager, playwright and artist whose life was taken by tuberculosis while still in her early thirties. She wrote the play A Daughter of the Nile, that found its greater success after her death, and was the mother of the writer Glen MacDonough (Babes in Toyland).

Anna Laura Fish was born in Greenwich, New York, the daughter of Peter and Catherine (née Losee) Fish. Her father worked as a wheelwright and possibly had additional income that accounted for his family's comfortable circumstances. At an early age Don submitted Gathering Pond Lilies for publication in Frank Leslie’s Ladies Magazine, the first of a number of her short stories to appear in Leslie’s periodical over her life. Don was an accomplished landscape and portrait artist with at least one of her paintings exhibited at the New York National Academy of Design selling for $150. In the late 1860s she married twice; first to George S. Fox, who operated a photography studio in Troy, New York. For a time she assisted him with the his photography business before their marriage fell apart over her desire to pursue a career in theatre. She next married a theatrical agent named Thomas B. MacDonough, a union that in 1870 would produce their son Glen, born in Brooklyn, New York.

Don began her acting career with a traveling troupe performing in Brooklyn and later spent time with John Ellsler's company in Cleveland. By August 1875, (as Laura Don) she was playing Ophelia to E. L. Davenport’s Hamlet at New York’s Grand Opera House. At the same venue that September, she played Isabel, the principle female lead in The Pioneer Patriot: or the Dawn of Liberty with Harry Watkins and Joseph F. Wheelock and in July 1876 at Hooley’s Theatre in Brooklyn, the Spanish beauty, Donna Jovita Castro, in Bret Harte's Two Men of Sandy Bar. At Booth's Theatre in late 1878 she was Mary Meredith in Our American Cousin to George Parkes’ Lord Dundreary and Frank Hardenberg’s Asa Trenchard, and the following January she appeared at The New Fifth Avenue Theatre in Dr. Clyde as Lady Hammond. On June 16, 1880, Don sailed for England aboard the Cunard liner S.S. Seythia with Frank Mayo's company and was back in New York by that September to assume the role Antonia in Archibald Clavering Gunter's Two Nights in Rome during the closing days of its run at Union Square Theatre. On February 7, 1881, Don began a two-month run as Erima in Fresh, the American and on November 28 of that year she starred in the American debut of George Robert Sims' My Mother-in-Law, both staged at Abbey's Park Theatre on 932 Broadway, New York.