Phoebe Davies
| Phoebe Davies | |
|---|---|
Photograph from the New York Star, February, 1909
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| Born |
February 7, 1864 Cardigan, Wales, U.K. |
| Died | December 4, 1912 (aged 48) Larchmont, New York, USA |
| Other names | Phoebe Davies Grismer |
| Occupation | Stage Actress |
| Spouse(s) | Joseph R. Grismer |
Phoebe Davies (February 7, 1864 – December 4, 1912) was a Welsh-born American stage actress who starred in over 4,000 performances of the Lottie Blair Parker play, Way Down East.
Phoebe Davies was born in Cardigan, Wales, the daughter of David and Annie (née Griffiths) Davies. Her father, who was originally drawn to California by the Gold Rush of 1849, returned with his family in the early 1870s to work for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Her father later joined the Lighthouse Service where he would rise to captain the lighthouse tender Madroño. While still in school Davies won an audition with David Belasco, then stage manager of the Baldwin Theatre Stock Company in San Francisco, that led to an offer to play a part in their next production. An illness prevented her from taking the role that only postponed her professional stage début a short while later as a member of the Oakland California Stock Company.
She first appeared in a play by a local California playwright (Cipricio or Ciprico) entitled Adolph Chalet in which her performance as Marie, a minor role, went largely unnoticed in a cast that included Jeffreys Lewis, Osmond Tearle and Gerard Eyre. Later in the season she won praise for her depiction of Nadia in a dramatization of the Jules Verne novel Michael Strogoff.
Around 1882 Davies joined the Baldwin Theatre Stock Company where she was given the opportunity to support the great Italian actor Ernesto Rossi as Regan and the Player Queen in productions of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hamlet and in the role Lady Angela in Charles Francis Coghlan's The Royal Box, his adaption of the Alexandre Dumas play Kean. That same season William Edward Sheridan, a well known actor of the day, cast her as Prince Arthur to his Baldwin in King John, Lady Ann in Richard III and the title role in Romeo and Juliet opposite his Mercutio. During the period she also appeared with the seventy-one-year-old veteran actor Charles R. Thorne as Maritana in an adaption of the Jules Massenet Opéra comique, Don César de Bazan and as Hortense to Jennie Lee’s Little Jo in Dickens’s Bleak House.
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