Paula Sperdakos: From Upper Canada to Broadway: Elizabeth
Jane Phillips,
Grande Dame of American Stock Theatre
Few
people now recognize the name of Elizabeth Jane Phillips, even though
she had a
successful cross-border acting career of forty-five years, and is
likely Canada’s
first expatriate actress. Born in 1830 in Chatham, Upper Canada, she began acting with
the
Amateur Theatrical Society of Hamilton in 1848, and then joined John
Nickinson’s Royal Lyceum company in Toronto in
1852. She played all the supporting
female roles that Nickinson’s daughters would not or were not old
enough to
play. In 1858 Phillips left Canada,
and except as a member of various touring companies, never returned.
Her work
took her all over the United States, until in 1877 she became a member
of A. M.
Palmer’s stock company at the Union Square Theatre in New York, which,
according to theatre chronicler G.C.D. Odell (Annals of the New York
Stage,
1927), was "one of the finest stock companies the city ever knew,” and
she
and her colleagues were considered “among the best stock actors in
America.” This paper will serve as an
introduction to an actress who was never a star, but rather a trouper,
one of
the unsung heroines of the theatre during the nineteenth century.