Kate Claxton was born on August 24, 1848 in Somerville, New Jersey, United States. He was the daughter of Spencer Wallace Cone, a lawyer whose literary inclinations led him to spend more time in the writing of plays, editorial work, and speaking in public, than at the bar. Her grandfather, the Reverend Spencer H. Cone, had been an actor before he became a clergyman. Her mother was Josephine Martinez, daughter of a Spaniard, Tomas Martinez, and of Margaret Terry.
Kate was educated at private schools in New York.
Claxton's early stage aspirations received no parental encouragement, and she went to Chicago, where she thought there would be less family opposition to her desire to become an actress, and in that city, at the Dearborn Street Theatre, on December 21, 1869, she made her debut as Mary Blake in Andy Blake. A week later she joined Lotta’s company at McVicker’s Theatre in Chicago, and before long she was back in New York, a full-fledged actress. She joined Augustin Daly’s company at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, where she first appeared on September 13, 1870, as Jo, in Man and Wife. She remained there through more than two seasons, but rarely played anything but inconspicuous characters.
An engagement by A. M. Palmer at the Union Square Theatre, during which she acted Mathilde in Led Astray, resulted in her being cast for the part of Louise, the blind girl, in The Two Orphans. This melodrama from the French, in which there is abundant action, pathos, bitter anguish, and a conflict between love and duty, was produced on December 26, 1874. For the rest of her life she was identified with this play throughout the country. She was acting in it in 1876, at the Brooklyn Theatre on the evening it was destroyed by fire with a loss of more than two hundred lives. She sought other plays and characters, notably: The World Against Her, Booties’s Baby, The Sea of Ice, and Cruel London, but the public invariably demanded her Louise in The Two Orphans and nothing else. In that character she had the advantage of the sympathy of impressionable audiences for a hapless girl, placed in a series of overwhelming misfortunes from which she emerged triumphant, and she played it always, in later life as well as in youth, with a simplicity that won the hearts of multitudes.
In 1878 Claxton was married to Charles A. Stevenson, an English actor who was for many years a member of her company. Their marriage was annulled in 1911.
