KATE REIGNOLDS APPEARED
WITH LAURA KEENE'S COMPANY

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KATE REIGNOLDS
(May 16, 1836 - July 11, 1911)

She was christened Catherine Mary Reignolds, the granddaughter of an English soldier who had been among the first killed at the Battle of Waterloo.  In 1850 her widowed mother left England and brought Kate and her two sisters to the U.S. settling in Chicago.  For four years the family attempted to earn a living on the stage in Chicago and Kate recalls in her memoirs how she carried most of the burden of support for them.

By 1855 Kate moved to New York where she arranged to meet Edwin Forrest.  After Forrest auditioned her, she was hired to play the ingenue Virginia to his title role of Virginius in Sheridan Knowles's play.  After her New York debut at the Broadway Theatre, she was employed in the theatre for almost fifteen years.   With Laura Keene's company she appeared in sixteen productions and then moved to the Bowery Theatre under the management of John Brougham.        
     She joined Ben De Bar's company at the St. Louis Opera House. and performed in his stock company  at the St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans, where she could perform with visiting stars. She performed Juliet to the Romeo of Charlotte Cushman and also appeared with Matilda Heron, James E. Murdoch and James K. Hackett.   She then joined the Boston Museum stock company for five years playing many leading roles including Desdemona, Juliet, Lady Gay Spanker, and Peg Woffington.  While there, she also appeared opposite John Wilkes Booth, whom she described in her memoirs as "violent and uncontrolled", an actor who left her frightened on Desdemona's deathbed and bedraggled in Juliet's torn costume.

Courtesy PictureHistory.com

With her reputation established in this country. she traveled to England in 1868, where she appeared at the Princess's Theatre in London and toured in regional theatres. While appearing in Nobody's Daughter in Exeter, she injured her back in a fall on stage. The remainder of her tour was canceled and she returned to America.

In 1886 she began to present dramatic readings for Boston charities.  Three years later she appeared in matinees at Boston's Columbia Theatre in staged readings of Henrik Ibsen's plays.

After retiring from her active stage career, she taught elocution to young women interested in acting. Her memoir, Yesterdays with Actors, is based on a series of articles originally published in the Boston Herald and released in book form in 1887.

During a severe New England heat wave on July 11, 1911, she died of heat prostration at her summer home in Concord, Massachusetts.

I own a rare copy of Yesterdays With Actors by Ms. Reignolds-Winslow (Winslow being the surname of her second husband).  In her introduction, she wrote:
   
     "In the memories of theatre-goers, a generation is said to count no more than ten years, and we are reckoned old folks by the public after a comparatively short service.  But I was startled to find in a recent book of dramatic biography a statement that my father was killed at Waterloo; whereas it was my grandfather who died there, when my father was eight weeks old.

     This seemed to crowd me rather cruelly into an historic period, and the incident has been the spur to jot down a few trifling recollections that may be of some slight interest to those who share them; before their subjects are forgotten, and the writer has become 'the idle singer of an empty day'."