Russell, Annie (1864–1936)

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Russell, Annie (1864–1936)

American actress. Born on January 12, 1864, in Liverpool, England; died of myocarditis on January 16, 1936, in Winter Park, Florida; daughter of Joseph Russell (a civil engineer) and Jane (Mount) Russell; married Eugene Wiley Presbrey (a stage manager), on November 2, 1884 (divorced 1897); married Oswald Yorke (an English actor), on March 27, 1904 (died 1931).

Born in Liverpool, England, in 1864, Annie Russell was five years old when she immigrated with her family to Canada, where her father Joseph Russell soon died. Russell went on the stage at age eight to help support her mother Jane Mount Russell and two younger siblings, making her first professional appearance in a production of Miss Moulton at the Montreal Academy of Music in 1872. Six years later, she joined a Gilbert and Sullivan company and made her first New York appearance in H.M.S. Pinafore at the Lyceum Theater in May 1879. The following year, she toured South America and the West Indies with a repertory company, playing a variety of roles from young boys to elderly women. She then returned to New York, and the Madison Square Theater, where she made herself look older with the help of an elaborate hairdo and a long dress in order to win the title role in the stage version of Frances Hodgson Burnett 's Esmeralda, which ran for 350 performances and then toured for a year. The wholesome role made her a star, and she toured for two years in the equally wholesome Hazel Kirke, before joining A.M. Palmer's company in Madison Square. She married Eugene Wiley Presbrey, a stage manager for the A.M. Palmer Company, on November 2, 1884.

Russell appeared in several plays throughout the 1880s, including Broken Hearts (1885), Engaged (1886), Elaine (1887), and Captain Swift (1888), but problems with her abusive husband aggravated her poor health. Friends raised $3,000 in a benefit performance for her, and she used the money to flee her husband (they would be divorced in 1897). She then spent two years in Italy, recovering.

Russell returned to the New York stage in 1894, in The New Woman. The following year, she became the leading woman in Nat Good-win's company, and in 1896 appeared in Sue, by Bret Harte and T.E. Pemberton. Sue moved to London in 1898, where it was a hit. In the next several years, Russell appeared in A Royal Family, Miss Hobbs, Catherine, The Girl and the Judge, and The Younger Mrs. Parling, all wholesome roles she later dismissed as "Anniegenues." On March 27, 1904, she married English actor Oswald Yorke, and in London in November 1905, she starred in the premier production of George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara, which the playwright directed. She returned to New York in 1906, where for one season she gave an unusual and highly regarded performance as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Russell believed that theater should promote education and morality, and would not appear in plays she considered low or profane; because of this, she never performed in some of the greatest plays of her time. (She particularly disliked Ibsen's work.) Although she was one of the most highly paid female actors—earning $500 a week—Russell complained, perhaps accurately, that audiences wanted only to be amused, not to watch "splendid plays" or to be morally uplifted. She believed that if high-minded women supported the theater, the dignity of the American stage could be protected.

By 1912, Russell had saved enough money and found enough supporters to form the Annie Russell Old English Comedy Company, which during the sole year of its existence produced well-received revivals of She Stoops to Conquer, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Rivals. During World War I, she worked with the Salvation Army and the Red Cross, and assisted French war orphans, all to the detriment of her health. In 1918, after a tiring two years touring in The Thirteenth Chair, she retired from performance. Some years later, her longtime friend Mary Louise Curtis Zimbalist donated funds to build a theater in her honor at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Russell, who became a professor of theater arts at the college, came out of retirement to perform in Browning's In a Balcony at the inauguration of the Annie Russell Theater in 1932, and also performed there the following year in The Thirteenth Chair. She continued teaching at Rollins until her death on January 16, 1936.