Baptised Emma Weeden, January 1815 at St George Hanover Square, London, England, a daughter of William and Sarah Weeden. The Weeden family included Emma’s brother William, and her two sisters Jemima Thomasina and Sarah. Their father was groom and stable master for Other Archer Windsor, the Earl of Plymouth. They grew up on the Windsor estates in Leicester and Tardebigge, Worchester.
He received a good education and became proficient with horses.
After a brief stage career in the provincial theatres of that country traveled to the United States in 1851 with Daniel Wilmarth Waller, to whom she had been married. Her husband was an actor and is said to have been a native of New York, the son of a merchant named Wilmarth, the transposed name by which he and his wife were known being assumed for professional purposes at the outset of their joint stage career. Although Mr. Waller acted Hamlet and other tragic roles in New York soon after their arrival, there is no authentic record of his wife's appearance in that city at this time. Going to San Francisco in 1853, they sailed thence for Australia, where at Melbourne Mrs. Waller acted Lady Macbeth. Returning to London, Mrs. Waller made her debut at the Drury Lane on September 15, 1856, as Pauline in Bulwer-Lytton's The Lady of Lyons. In the diaries of E. L. Blanchard he notes that "as Pauline - she lacked vigour, but was gentle and graceful". If his judgment is correct, she must have grown appreciably in physical and intellectual intensity, for she became one of the leading emotional actresses on the American stage. Towards the end of 1857 the Wallers returned to the United States, where they thereafter remained. Mrs. Waller made her debut at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia on October 19, 1857, as Ophelia to the Hamlet of Mr. Waller. On the second and third nights of that engagement she acted successively Pauline and Lady Macbeth. She was described as "of stately presence, neither slender nor stout in person, and had an interesting and expressive face"; the same spectator adds that she acted Lady Macbeth with an "intensity of passion" that was "almost painful. " Her first appearance in New York was on April 5, 1858, as Marina to her husband's Ferdinand in a new version of John Webster's tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. Thereafter she starred for some twenty years throughout the country, often with Mr. Waller as her principal associate, among her most conspicuous characters being Queen Margaret in Richard III and Queen Katharine in Henry VIII (both in support of Edwin Booth), Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering, Nelly Brady in Edmund Falconer's The Peep o'Day, and Julia in Sheridan Knowles's The Hunchback. Though Mrs. Waller was accused of imitating the Meg Merrilies of Charlotte Cushman, she had never seen her in the part, and her Meg was an original assumption of that character. "The weird dignity of her bearing, " wrote William Winter, "was impressive beyond words; there were moments, indeed, when she seemed to be a soul inspired by communion with beings of another world". She was also one of a number of actresses who seemed to take pleasure in impersonating male Shakespearean characters, among the most noteworthy of these being her interpretations of Hamlet and Iago. She closed her career as an actress in 1878 as Hester Stanhope in a modern play entitled An Open Verdict. Afterwards, like many other actors and actresses, she gave public readings from Shakespeare and other dramatists, her last noteworthy public appearance being made at Chickering Hall in New York on December 1, 1881. Mr. Waller died in 1882, and for some years thereafter she taught elocution in New York. Ill health finally compelled her to abandon all active professional work, and she lived in complete retirement at the home of her son in New York, where she died.
Emma Weeden married Robert Fullerton at Brighton on the 2nd of February 1839. Her husband died and Emma and Daniel Wilmarth Waller married on the 29th of April 1851 in St Marks, Old Street, Middlesex.
