Marion Hood

Marion Hood (1 April 1854 - 14 August 1912) was an English soprano who performed in opera and musical theatre in the last decades of the 19th century. She is perhaps best remembered for creating the role of Mabel in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance in London.

Born Sarah Ann Isaac in Liverpool. Hood was a music hall performer as a child by the age of 11 under the name Marion Isaac. She married a Mr. Hunt of the Alhambra Palace Music Hall in Kingston upon Hull. In 1876, she had moved to London to study singing at the Royal Academy of Music. Her husband had died by 1880.

In 1880 she made her London stage debut at the Opera Comique, joining the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and creating the role of Mabel for the London production of The Pirates of Penzance. According to her colleague Rutland Barrington, Hood was "a perfect picture to look at and equally pleasant to listen to ... tall, slight, and graceful, a typical English girl with a wealth of fair hair, which I believe was all her own. Her singing of the waltz song, 'Poor Wandering One', was quite one of the features of the first act [of Pirates]." The New York Times wrote that she had "a soprano voice of rare flexibility and power."

After that engagement, Hood left the company and married her second husband, Mr. Hesseltine, taking a brief break from performing until August 1881, when she appeared as Constance in the first production of Stephens and Solomon's Claude Duval at the Olympic Theatre, with George Power who had been her partner as Frederic in Pirates. She then sang at the Alhambra Theatre and Avenue Theatre, performing in Frederic Clay's Golden Ring and Karl Millöcker's The Beggar Student. After this, she toured the British provinces in grand opera, appearing as Marguerite in Faust, in which role she then appeared at the Crystal Palace.

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