Sylvia Gerrish

Sylvia Gerrish
NYPL Digital Gallery
Born	Lillian Rollins May 1860 (1860-05) Big Oak Flat, California, United States
Died	December 8, 1906(1906-12-08) (aged 46) Brooklyn, New York, United States
Occupation	Musical Comedy Actress
Spouse(s)	Henry G. Hilton

Sylvia Gerrish (May, 1860 – December 8, 1906) was an American musical theatre performer who found success in New York and London in the 1880s and early 1890s. She was known as "The Girl with the Poetical Legs".

Gerrish began her career in San Francisco theatres in 1880 and commenced a long tour with Willie Edouin’s company the following year in a piece called Dreams. She continued touring until 1883, and in 1884 she began to play roles on Broadway, especially at Bijou Opera House and the Casino Theatre, achieving considerable popularity. She travelled to London in the early 1890s, where she attracted a large following, but soon after her return in 1893, her career ended.

In the late 1880s, she became known for a love affair with Henry G. Hilton that cost the millionaire's son his fortune. After Hilton's first wife died, Gerrish lived with him in increasing poverty. Hilton died in 1905, and the following year Gerrish died alone and in debt, in Hilton's dilapidated mansion, at the age of 46.

Lillian M. Rollins was born in Big Oak Flat, California the daughter of, Holman C. Rollins, a native of New Hampshire, and Sylvia Gerrish, originally from Maine. Her parents were initially drawn to California by the Gold Rush of 1849, though her father later gave up on prospecting to work as a railroad flagman. Gerrish was raised in West Oakland, California, where she attended Prescott School and later Oakland High School. She performed in public during church services at Hamilton’s Independent Church as a soloist accompanied by a church organist.

Under her mother’s maiden name, Gerrish's first known professional stage performance was in the French comic opera The Weathercock (La girouette, by Emile Hémery and Henri Bocage, with music by Auguste Cœdès), at San Francisco’s Bush Street Theatre in July 1880 with Emelle Melville’s Comic Opera Company. On September 21, 1880, she opened in Aladdin, as Princess Badroulbadour, at Baldwin’s Theatre on Market Streetin San Francisco, and the following month at the Bush Street Theatre she appeared in a revival of H. M. S. Pinafore. At Christmas 1880, she appeared in Francis Burnand's musical burlesque Ixion, or the Man at the Wheel staged at the Standard Theatre on Bush Street, San Francisco.