Selina Dolaro

Selina Dolaro (20 August 1849 – 23 January 1889) was an English singer, actress, theatre manager and writer. During a career in operetta and other forms of musical theatre, she managed several of her own opera companies and raised four children as a single mother. She is best remembered as a producer of the original production of Trial by Jury by Gilbert and Sullivan.

Dolaro was born in London. Her father was the violinist and conductor Benjamin Simmonds, and her mother was Julia (née Lewis). Dolaro received early music lessons from her father's colleagues, and she attended the Paris Conservatory as a teenager to continue her musical studies. In 1865, at the age of sixteen, she married Isaac Dolaro Belasco, an Italian Jew of Spanish descent, in Upper Kennington, England. By 1870, she had adopted Dolaro as her stage name.

Dolaro made her stage debut at the Lyceum Theatre, in the role of the Spanish princess, Galsuinda, in Hervé's operetta Chilpéric in 1870 and soon played there in Offenbach operettas. Successes at various London theatres followed: After a season at the Gaiety Theatre, London, Dolaro starred in an English-language Offenbach adaptation called Breaking the Spell, on tour with Fred Sullivan's Operetta Company in 1871. In 1872 Dolaro was a leading performer in H. B. Farnie's English-language adaptation of Offenbach's Geneviève de Brabant, in Hervé's Doctor Faust and in a burlesque of Ferdinand Hérold's Zampa ("Charmingly sung by Miss Dolaro in imitation of Mdlle Chaumont", said The Times) She also appeared in the title role of Bizet's Carmen in the first English-language production, with the Carl Rosa Opera Company, opposite Durward Lely as Don José. In 1873, Dolaro divorced her husband on the grounds of his adultery and desertion; she brought up her two sons and two daughters on her own income.

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