HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAGGIE MITCHELL
       (June 14, 1832 - March 22, 1918)

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote verses praising her performance
as the piquant country girl in Fanchon, the Cricket.

Her parents encouraged her to pursue a career in the theatre. At the age of 19, she filled a vacancy in the cast of The Soldier's Daughter at Burton's Theatre in New York.  The next season she was hired at the Bowery Theatre at a salary of four dollars a week, playing mostly boys' roles, including the Prince of Wales in Shakespeare's Richard lll and Oliver Twist, an audience favorite.  She would go on to perform in Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and other cities in a wide repertoire of male and female roles.  But in 1860 she discovered Fanchon, the Cricket. The play was produced in 1861 at the St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans. The Picayune's reviewer noted that "the applause...which was constant throughout the performance, was at once a tribute to the merits of the piece and the manner in which it was acted."  That was the game changer. Until Fanchon she had been just one of many clever comediennes, but now she was considered a truly notable American actress. The popularity of Fanchon over other plays in her repertory is reflected by a return visit to New Orleans in 1870.  Her straight plays did not attract audiences even though Henry Wadsworth Longfellow admired her portrayal of Jane Eyre and urged her to take that play to England. Charlotte Cushman also urged her to play Fanchon abroad.

     Like many of her contemporaries, she achieved success in a single role, which she returned to again and again for twenty-five years.  Luther Holden described her success with the role: "If we examine Miss Mitchell's stage art to discover the secret of her really wonderful success, we readily find that naturalness and a seeming absence of art are its essential qualities. . .Her portrayals were unique, and yet nothing more than the holding of a mirror before nature's self. She had the rare faculty of painting the picture of maidenly purity and nobility of soul most deftly; and her audience laughed when she laughed and wept when she wept." (Famous American Actors of Today)  Holden described her as a "small and elfish creature with a wealth of sunny, golden hair, whose nervous energy and sprightliness, no less than an exquisite form and face, gave picturesque presence to the line of child heroines she made peculiarly her own."

     Maggie Mitchell continued to play Fanchon until her last appearance at the age of fifty-eight in 1892.  Unlike some other actors, she managed her money well and retired from the stage with a small fortune.

Reference:  Famous American Actors of Today, edited by Frederic Scott McKay and Charles E.L. Wingate (1896)   Notable Women in the American Theatre:  Susan Cole