Background
Clara Fisher was the daughter of Frederick George Fisher, an Irish Shakespearian scholar and a London auctioneer. Earlier he had been librarian in Brighton where he became the intimate of playwrights and actors.
Clara Fisher was the daughter of Frederick George Fisher, an Irish Shakespearian scholar and a London auctioneer. Earlier he had been librarian in Brighton where he became the intimate of playwrights and actors.
Four of his six children made reputations on the stage. Clara was four when he began to teach her to recite.
She was six when she made her sensational début at Drury Lane Theatre (Dec. 10, 1817) as Prime Minister of Lilliput, in a children’s version of Garrick’s Gulliver, reciting also excerpts from Richard III. The miniature majesty of her Lord Flimuap, the precocious villany of her Richard, made her a child celebrity overnight.
After repeating her triumph at Covent Garden, she starred in the United Kingdom for a decade, constantly widening her repertory. Her verbal memory was prodigious, as was her grasp of characters presumably beyond a child’s ken. One of her early feats was the impersonation of half- a-dozen widely different parts in a single play. Injudicious managers forced her into a succession of mature male roles. Before she was twelve she had played Shylock, Sir Peter Teazle, Goldfinch, Dr. Pangloss, Dr. Ollapod, and Young Norval. Ireland declares she could portray the soul of a grown man despite her child’s physique ; and Hutton records that when cast with actors of regulation size, she threw them out of drawing, dominating the scene.
Her Richard was seriously compared with that of Kean. In 1827, her family having removed to New York, she made her American début at the Park Theatre, her instant success precipitating the “Clara Fisher craze. ” Box offices were mobbed when she appeared, poems were written to her, fashions, hotels, babies and stage-coaches named after her.
At sixteen she is described as bewitching rather than beautiful, daintily petite, her graceful head boyishly “bobbed, ” her action spirited, her expression artless and gay, full of a captivating archness.
Her dramatic singing of Scottish heroic ballads made a hit by virtue of her personality rather than her voice. During her extensive American starring tour which carried her West and South, she seems to have played fewer men’s than boys’ parts, appearing often in light comedy rôles like Little Pickle in The Spoiled Child, or Maria in Actress of All Work. The financial crisis of 1837 swept away her early professional earnings. As leading lady of stock companies supporting New Jersey, in the forties and had now left his interest in them to his only surviving son.
Her marriage (December 6, 1834) to the Irish composer, James Gaspard Macder, marked her decline as a juvenile star.