This Popular Actress Has Made Successes
in Three Distinct Lines as a
Result of Changing Weight.
Fay Templeton has made three separate and distinct starts in her career,
and this without counting her baby days one, when, her father being
manager of a theater in Saint Joseph, Missouri, she was put in the bill
whenever an infant was needed. In due course, however, she was whisked
away from the footlights and sent abroad to be educated. On her return,
Rice secured for her _Gabriel_ in "Evangeline" and thus launched her--in
tights--on the first of her three epochs--that of man's attire.
As _Gabriel_ she became the talk of the town, but when she appeared at the
same theater--the Fourteenth Street--some seasons later as _Hendrik
Hudson_, in a burletta of that name, her former admirers declared that she
was fat, and declined to worship longer at her shrine. Thus it came about
that when Edward E. Rice, her old manager in "Evangeline," engaged her to
break the title role in "Excelsior, Jr.," with which he opened the theater
part of his Olympia in 1895, he stipulated that when the time came for
rehearsals she must not weigh over one hundred and fifty pounds.
Whether she succeeded in getting herself down to just this figure is not a
matter of veracious record, but it is true that she made a hit with her
men's clothes and became an authority in the yellow journals on masculine
attire. But the banting process was not to her liking, so that Miss
Templeton finally decided to seek the sort of parts where her avoirdupois
would cut no figure in the artistic results. In this way she came to join
Weber & Fields's, entering upon the second phase of her career as a
burlesque actress of the first rank.
Her imitations of Irene Vanbrugh in "The Gay Lord Quex," of Ethel
Barrymore in "Captain Jinks," of Annie Russell in "The Girl and the
Judge," were all of them wonders in their way, and possibly had she been
content to remain at the Twenty-Ninth Street music-hall for more than a
season after Lillian Russell's advent, the two partners might never have
split. But quit she did, and went up to the New York, where her imitation
of Fougere in "Broadway to Tokio" was called by one of the critics a
classic.
Incapacity of authors to provide the proper sort of vehicle is responsible
for Miss Templeton's passage to her third stage of triumph. This has just
been reached in "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," that classless
concoction of George M. Cohan which shows her as a sedate housemaid of
somber clothes and repressed demeanor. But so subtle is her art that she
fills the huge New Amsterdam Theater as only Mansfield has ever succeeded
in filling it before. There is no tinsel, no dancing, not a single
imitation, but in an entirely new field Fay Templeton has blazed a path by
the sheer finesse of her skill in attaining results by the simplest
means.