Doris Keane - 10884

American actress. Keane made her professional stage debut in Whitewashing Julia in 1903. This was a small role but she went on to play leading roles in The Happy Marriage in 1909 and The Lights o' London in 1911. Her breakthrough came in 1913, when she played the starring role of Margherita Cavallini in Edward Sheldon's huge hit Romance in New York, followed by a London production in 1915, which ran for 1,049 performances. Both productions featured her as an opera star who has an intense affair with a young clergyman, played by William Courtenay. (Sheldon had originally offered the male lead to his friend John Barrymore, but Barrymore turned it down, preferring to do comedies.) Sheldon reportedly fell in love with Keane and yearned for her all his life. She played the part of Cavallini for the next five years and returned in revivals regularly during the 1920s. In 1920, Keane made a silent film of Romance, distributed by the then newly formed United Artists. Her male lead in the film was Basil Sydney, a British actor she had married in 1918 (he was 13 years younger than her). The importance of Keane's role in Romance can be seen from the fact that Royal Doulton produced a white porcelain figure of her in the part. Keane also played Catherine the Great in Czarina in 1922 after Sheldon had revised the play especially for her This is a very pretty early vintage glossy sepia photograph (8.5" x 7.25"), nicely signed and dated (1916) in dark blue fountain pen ink across the image. The dimensions indicate that the photograph has been trimmed but the job has been neatly done. There's also what appears to be a thin raised vertical line, about half an inch in , on either side of the image, which suggests that the photograph was originally framed, with the mount pressing into it there. Overall condition, given its age (100 years!) is good.