May Irwin was a Canadian actress, singer and star of vaudeville. A highly paid performer, she was a shrewd investor and became a very wealthy woman, who helped to popularize many hit songs of the day.
Background
May was born on June 27, 1862 in Whitby, Ontario, Canada. Her real name was Ada Campbell. Her parents, Robert E. and Jane (Draper) Campbell, were of Scottish descent; her grandfather, John, served in the Canadian parliament. She had one older sister, Georgia, who later took the stage name of Flo Irwin.
Education
May Irwin and her sister were educated at St. Cecilia Convent at Mt. Hope and in the high school at Whitby, and their talents as singers were early demonstrated in school and church performances.
Career
After Robert E. Campbell's death, his widow took her daughters (May and Georgia) to the United States, hoping to find employment for them in the small-time music halls. Their first professional engagement was at the Adelphi Theatre, Buffalo, New York, in December 1875, where the manager chose to bill them as "The Irwin Sisters. " After performing in variety houses in the Middle West, they made their first appearance in New York City at the London Theatre on January 20, 1877.
In October of that year Tony Pastor presented them at his New York Music Hall as "Infantile Actresses, Vocalists and Character Artistes, " and for the next six years the Irwin sisters were stock members of the Pastor company, singing, dancing, and playing roles in the improvised sketches and burlesques. In 1883 Augustin Daly invited May Irwin to come under his management. Here, in the company of such famous players as John Drew, Ada Rehan, and Otis Skinner, she developed her skill as a legitimate comedienne. Her first appearance was in Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's Girls and Boys (December 5, 1883), and she later played secondary comic roles: Popham in The Magistrate, Susan in A Night Off, Lucy in The Recruiting Officer.
On August 1, 1884, she made her first appearance in London with Daly's company in Dollars and Sense. Although her reputation as an actress was growing, she confessed that she was never at ease in the confining form of legitimate comedy; she preferred the freedom to improvise which the music hall gave her. Consequently, in 1887, she joined the Howard Athenaeum Company of Boston and toured for two seasons in variety. With this troupe she played in Home Rule, the first of the farcical sketches to be written for her by John J. McNally of the Boston Herald. In 1889-90 she joined John and James Russell's City Directory company, in which she played "one of the many Smiths. "
Charles Frohman engaged her in 1893 to play with Henry Miller in His Wedding Day, but she was happier in the burlesque afterpiece, The Poet and the Puppets (a travesty of Lady Windermere's Fan), in which she sang the popular song "After the Ball" by Charles K. Harris. In 1893, under the management of Isaac B. Rich and William Harris, she appeared in the first of a series of full-length entertainments, farce comedies with music, designed for her special talents by McNally, Glen MacDonough, and others. She began as Elizabeth Alwright in McNally's A Country Sport.
In 1895 she was starred as Beatrice Byke in McNally's The Widow Jones. An episode from this play, a somewhat prolonged kiss between the two principals, filmed in close-up for Thomas A. Edison's "Vitascope, " was one of the earliest motion pictures to be exhibited commercially. Her next McNally play, Courted into Court (1896), introduced the popular song "A Hot Time in the Old Town. " In 1897 she was the Countess de Cagiac in H. A. de Souchet's The Swell Mrs. Fitzwell.
For the next ten years she acted under her own management: Kate Kip, Buyer by Glen MacDonough (1898), Alice Penn in Sister Mary by MacDonough (1899). In 1908 she appeared as Mrs. Baxter in The Mollusc by H. H. Davies, and in 1910 as Mrs. Jim in Getting a Polish by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson. She Knows Better Now (1911) and Widow by Proxy (1913) were followed in 1915 by No. 13 Washington Square, a special performance of which was given in Washington for President Wilson and his cabinet. In 1919-20 she made her final appearance in a legitimate comedy, On the Hiring Line, by Harriet Ford and Harvey O'Higgins, and in 1922, after a brief engagement as master of ceremonies for an intimate revue, she retired permanently to her dairy farm at Clayton, New York.
After suffering a stroke, she contracted bronchial pneumonia and died in New York City.
Achievements
Personality
On the stage May Irwin was the essence of high-spirited good humor, quick of wit and light of foot in spite of her buxom figure. Off the stage her bubbling, sociable personality was balanced by an equal amount of shrewed business sense, marked by the management of her farm and valuable real estate in New York City.
Connections
May Irwin was married in 1878 to Frederick W. Keller of St. Louis, by whom she had two sons, Walter and Harry. Keller died in 1886, and in 1907 she married her manager, Kurt Eisfeldt, who survived her.