Valerie Bergere
| Valerie Bergere | |
|---|---|
The Actors' Birthday Book, 1908
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| Born |
Valerie Zenobia de Beaumont Lieb February 8, 1867 Metz, France |
| Died | September 16, 1938 (aged 71) Hollywood, California |
| Occupation | Actress |
Valerie Bergere (February 8, 1867 – September 16, 1938) was a French-born American actress who had a near fifty-year career in theatre and cinema. She began in the chorus of a touring opera company before acting in repertory theatre productions for nearly a decade. Bergere rose to play leading roles, but found her true success in vaudeville where for some seventeen years she remained one of the top draws in variety theatre. Over her later years Bergere also took on character roles in some twenty Broadway and Hollywood productions.
Valerie Zenobia de Beaumont Lieb was born in Metz, Alsace-Lorraine. As Valerie Berger, she began her theatrical career in about 1890 after a brief stint with a San Francisco newspaper. Bergere first appeared on stage with her sister Leona as a chorus singer with the Conried Opera Company and later as an actress in German-language theatre productions.
In 1892 she made her English-language debut with a stock company in San Francisco, California, as Dora Vane in Harbor Lights, a melodrama by George Robert Sims and Henry Alfred Pettitt. The following year Bergere created the part of Mrs. Russell Ritchie in The Journalist, a play first presented in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Bergere next played parts with Maud Granger in tours of California and the Pacific Northwest. She was Blanch Livingston opposite Steve Brodie at the Fourteenth Street Theatre in the Robert Neilson Stephens 1894 play On the Bowery. In 1895 Bergere played Jen in Stephens’ A White Rat, and starred as the French adventurer Marie Vernet in On the Mississippi.
Over the season of 1897–98 Bergere was a member of the stock company affiliated with the Girard Avenue Theatre in Philadelphia, where she played Henrietta in The Two Orphans, adapted for the American stage by N. Hart Jackson and Albert Marshman Palmer from the original 1874 French play Les Deux Orphalines by Adolphe d'Ennery and Eugène Cormon; Mrs. Rawlston, in James L. Ford’s Jim the Penman; Suzanne, in The Masked Ball; adapted by Clyde Fitch from the original French by Alexandre Bisson and Fabrice Carré; Miriam, in The Butterflies; and the title role in an adaptation of Carmen. Bergere closed out the decade as a leading lady with the Dearborn Stock Company in Chicago.
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