Background
Mckee Rankin was born on Feburary 6, 1844 in Sandwich, Ontario Canada. He was named Arthur McKee, but he dropped his first name soon after going on the stage.
https://www.amazon.com/Arthur-Collection-Whirlpool-Precious-Defense/dp/B0083H1RJK?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0083H1RJK
Mckee Rankin was born on Feburary 6, 1844 in Sandwich, Ontario Canada. He was named Arthur McKee, but he dropped his first name soon after going on the stage.
He began his connection with the theatre in amateur performances and the next fifty years he ran the gamut of the entire range of stage characters. At the age of twenty-one he was on the professional stage and acting important rôles in Mrs. John Drew's stock company at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia, and in 1865 he even attempted a starring tour.
In 1874-75 they were leading players in the Union Square Theatre stock company in New York, taking part in the first production of The Two Orphans as the villain Jacques Frochard and as the youthful Henriette, whose pathetic blind sister was at the same time acted by Kate Claxton. Soon afterward they began a long career as joint stars which continued about twenty years, being always billed as Mr. and Mrs. McKee Rankin. The principal play in their repertory for several seasons was The Danites, a dramatization by P. A. Fitzgerald of Joaquin Miller's sketch, The First Families of the Sierras, in which Rankin played Sandy McGee and his wife appeared as Nancy Williams and as Billy Piper. Their tours in this play, which was a melodrama of crude quality and wholly popular appeal, included an engagement in London.
"Its reception was most flattering, " wrote Rankin, but they remained in England scarcely long enough to justify that remark. Another melodrama of the same type, The Golden Giant Mine, by Clay M. Greene, did not duplicate the success of The Danites in the United States, and his later career, during his association with his wife, and after their separation in the nineties, was one of extreme diversity.
He traveled far and wide from the Atlantic to the Pacific, he went to England and Australia, and he acted in many plays and vaudeville sketches, and in stock and touring companies.
He was Nance O'Neil's manager and leading actor when she suddenly rose to fame as an emotional actress in the early years of the twentieth century, his most important character while in her support being the father Schwartze in Magda (known as Heimath in the original), a German play which for some time was in vogue and was a leading feature in the repertories of Duse, Bernhardt, Modjeska, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell.
In his early days he is said to have been handsome and dashing, the perfect representative of the jeune premier on the stage; in his later years his long experience in melodrama made him hard and labored, with an astonishingly artificial technique.
In 1869 he was married to Kitty Blanchard, a popular young actress and dancer whose repute was no less than his.
Rankin had two daughters, both of whom were on the stage: Phyllis, who married Harry Davenport, son of Edward L. Davenport; and Gladys, who married Sidney Drew, son of Mrs. John Drew.