Frank Chanfrau was the son of a French naval officer who settled in America, and of his wife, Mehitable Trenchard of Westchester County. He was born on February 22, 1824 at the corner of the Bowery and Pell St. , New York City, New York, United States in a wooden tenement known as the Old Tree House.
Francis received a fair education.
For a time Chanfrau was a driver on the Ohio Canal, subsequently he learned the trade of carpentry, but eventually an inclination toward acting led him, first, into amateur organizations, and finally back to New York to the Edwin Forrest Dramatic Association.
His debut on the professional stage was as a super at the Bowery Theatre. Mimicry appears to have been his forte, and his imitations of Forrest won him considerable popularity. His reputation as an actor became established when as Jeremiah Clip in The Widow’s Victim, at Mitchell’s Olympic, he gave imitations of every actor of note.
Henceforth he had no difficulty in finding engagements, playing Laertes to the Hamlet of James W. Wallack, Jr. , at the Chatham (July 17, 1844), and Cedric in Ivanhoe at Palmo’s Opera House (April 7, 1845). The first great hit of Chanfrau’s career was at Mitchell’s Olympic, New York when in Benjamin A. Baker’s sketch A Glance at New York he took the part of Mose— a typical fireman of that period of hand engines, a half-ruffian, half-hero dare-devil, ever ready for an adventure or a fight. His performance of this role raised Chanfrau to stardom, and he carried the play to nearly every theatrical town in America. Identified with the character of Mose, he later had some difficulty in freeing himself from it. “Mr. Chanfrau’s immense success in this character, ” writes J. N. Ireland, “has been somewhat detrimental to his standing in his native city in a more elevated range of the drama; some squeamish connoisseurs insisting that an artist cannot excel in lines dissimilar. The conclusion, however, is unwarrantable and unjust, for his versatility, although unbounded in aim, is almost unequaled in merit, and his name is ever a reliable source of attraction and profit in almost every other city of the Union in a much higher grade of character”.
In 1848, in conjunction with W. Ogilvie Ewen, he leased the Chatham, opening it as Chanfrau’s National Theatre; from this he withdrew in 1850. Subsequently he had a disastrous managerial experience at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1851 he went to California. Returning a year later, he again tried his hand at management. Taking a lease of the historic Astor Opera House, the scene of the fatal For- rest-Macready riots, he reopened it with James Stark in Lear on August 27, 1852; the following month he changed the name of the house to New York Theatre. He was also the manager of White’s Varieties, opened the same year at 17-19 Bowery.
Chanfrau’s last stage success was in Kit the Arkansas Traveller. The role of Kit proved as popular throughout the country as John T. Raymond’s Colonel Sellers or Mayo’s Davy Crockett, and Chanfrau played it for twelve consecutive seasons, from September 23, 1872, to the time of his death, October 2, 1884.
In 1858 Chanfrau married Henrietta Baker of Philadelphia, already an actress of reputation, who later became, as Mrs. F. S. Chanfrau, one of the most noted actresses on the American stage. They preferred for the most part to star separately but in London Assurance he appeared as Sir Harcourt Courtley and she as Lady Gay Spanker.
