Career
She is perhaps best remembered for creating the role of Mabel in Gilbert and Sullivan"s The Pirates of Penzance in London. Born Sarah Ann Isaac in Liverpool. Hood was a music hall performer as a child by the age of 11 under the name Marion Isaac.
In 1876, she had moved to London to study singing at the Royal Academy of Music.
Her husband had died by 1880. In 1880 she made her London stage debut at the Opera Comique, joining the Doctorate"Oyly Carte Opera Company and creating the role of Mabel for the London production of The Pirates of Penzance. tall, slight, and graceful, a typical English girl with a wealth of fair hair, which I believe was all her own.
Her singing of the waltz song, "Poor Wandering One", was quite one of the features of the first acting" The New York Times wrote that she had "a soprano voice of rare flexibility and power."
She then sang at the Alhambra Theatre and Avenue Theatre, performing in Frederic Clay"s Golden Ring and Karl Millöcker"s The Beggar Student. After this, she toured the British provinces in grand opera, appearing as Marguerite in Faust, in which role she then appeared at the Crystal Palace.
Hood next appeared in Billee Taylor at the Gaiety Theatre in 1885 and Little Jack Sheppard in 1885-1886.
She then created the title role in B. C. Stephenson and Alfred Cellier"s hit Dorothy beginning in 1886, playing in the show for 350 performances until illness forced her to withdraw from the cast (to be replaced by Marie Tempest). She soon returned to the Gaiety to star in such burlesques as Monte Cristo Junior. (1887), Mission Esmeralda (1887), Frankenstein, or The Vampire"s Victim (1887-1888) and Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué (1889).
She toured America on two occasions with Gaiety companies during the period 1888-1890).
In 1891, Hood returned to London in a burlesque of Joan of Arc, or the Merry Maid of Orleans (by Adrian Ross and J L Shine). According to historian Michael Walters, Hood "had a bitterly unhappy life, though this was never reflected in her stage performances." She died in Thanet, Kent at the age of 58.
