Margaret Mitchell was an American actress. She wqas affectionately known as "Maggie Mitchell" to play-goers of four decades, created in the title role of Fanchon the Cricket a dramatic miniature of such delicacy, faithfulness, charm, and subtle power, that it must rank among the finer traditions of the stage.
Background
Margaret Julia Mitchell was born on June 14, 1837, in New York City. Her elder half-sisters, Mary, and Emma Mitchell were early on the stage, and when she was twelve, Maggie herself became so ambitious to act that her mother placed her under the tutelage of a veteran English player.
Career
On June 2, 1851, Margaret made her first appearance at Burton's Chambers Street Theatre as little Julia in The Soldier's Daughter. Her playing won her an engagement for the ensuing season at the Bowery Theatre, where she played boy parts, dancing between the acts. Here she scored her first real hit some months later as Oliver Twist. After winning favor in New York and Boston with the James M. Robinson company, she began to star. During nomad years she ranged principally up and down Ohio and the Mississippi in such light plays as A Middy Ashore, The Pet of the Petticoats, The Daughter of the Regiment, and Our Maggie. The grace of her fantastic shadow-dances inspired verses by Emerson. In later life, she played with ability many other parts, notably Jane Eyre, which the poet Longfellow urged her to repeat in England, Pauline in The Lady of Lyons, Mignon, and Parthenia in Ingomar. But it is her Fanchon which will be remembered. In 1892, she left the stage, retiring to Elberon, New Jersey. After her third marriage, she made her home in New York, where she died of apoplexy in 1918. She was buried as Margaret Julia Mace.
Achievements
Personality
In temperament and physique, Margaret fitted the part, that of a sprite-like child, grand-daughter to a reputed witch, herself a trifle "touched by the moon. " The actress was a little creature, winsome and piquant rather than beautiful, and animated with an electric energy which followed Fanchon through her lightning changes of mood. From skipping about the scene, laughing spontaneously, she dropped to sudden mysterious melancholy or flashed into elfin rages. It was "one of those perfect bits of acting before which even the chronic fault-finder is dumb".
Connections
Maggie Mitchell was apparently married three times. Her first marriage said to have taken place in the fifties, ended in divorce. On October 15, 1868, she was happily married at Troy, New York, to her manager, Henry Paddock, of Cleveland, by whom she had two children, who survived her. Paddock having died, she married again before 1909, Charles Abbott, formerly her leading man, whose legal name seems to have been Mace.