Alexis Fields Videos : SPOKEN WORD: American Actress Blanche DeBar Booth ~ Niece of John Wilkes Booth (c.1922)

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SPOKEN WORD: American Actress Blanche DeBar Booth ~ Niece of John Wilkes Booth (c.1922)

American Actress Blanche DeBar Booth (1844-1930) / I Have A Rendezvous With Death (Alan Seeger) / In Flanders Fields (Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae) / Recorded: c.1922 (Courtesy of Lawrence F. Holdridge... with special thanks!) -- Blanche DeBar Booth, daughter of Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. with his first wife, and the niece of actor Ben DeBar. Both Blanche and her uncle Ben DeBar, reportedly "enthusiastic" and "violent" in their pro-Confederate views, had been close to Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth (she is alleged to have said it would be right to kill Lincoln), and were investigated for possible complicity because of their friendship with actor, but both were cleared. Her debut, she did not use the name Booth on stage, was in 1865 at Ben DeBar's Theatre in St. Louis, as Kate Hardcastle in "She Stoops to Conquer." She then toured the West and South with leads in stock. In 1868 the actress married George Riddell. Her New York debut was in 1869 at the theater of Edwin Booth, her uncle, brother of John Wilkes. She played Ophelia opposite Edwin Booth in "Hamlet," and the lead in "Davy Crockett." Later she was in Mrs. John Drew's Philadelphia company, Joseph Jefferson's "Rip Van Winkle," John T. Ford's Baltimore stock company, Booth's stock company and the play "Enoch Arden." She retired from the stage in 1900 to conduct a dramatic school, making her home in Minneapolis .She died in 1930, aged 86, in Amityville, Long Island, New York. (Sources: The New York Times; The ...

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