Clara Fisher at age 6

LEST WE FORGET CLARA FISHER
(July 14, 1811 - November 12, 1889)

"The most perfect and finished actress that has ever trod the American stage. Though not conventionally beautiful, her vivacity and femininity were captivating."
                    Joseph Norton Ireland, Historian

A child prodigy, then leading actress for a seventy-year career, she was born in London, the sixth and youngest child of Frederick George Fisher, a librarian, auctioneer, amateur actor, and theatre enthusiast.

At age five, she was allowed to join her two older sisters in classes taught by the dancing master Dominic Corri who adapted Lilliput,
David Garrick's piece, so that all the roles with the exception of Gulliver, could be played by young girls.
Other roles included a passage from the last act of Richard lll, and a pantomime called Harlequin Gulliver in which she worked with the famous clown Joseph Grimaldi. To her repertoire she added portions of Shylock and Young Norval (from John Home's Douglas).
        Since the heydey of Master Betty ten years before, as she wrote in her Autobiography (1897), there had been no precocious children upon the stage and she had the whole field to herself.

In 1827, perhaps considering her waning popularity as a child star, Fisher's father accepted an offer from Edmond Simpson of the Park Theatre, New York, for American appearances.   When she was sixteen years old, she debuted at the Park Theatre in The Will, a rather ponderous melodrama enlivened by her interpretation of the song, "Hurrah for the Bonnets of Blue."
During her first years in America she toured, accompanied by her mother, to every theatre center in the United States. Her repertoire included Juliet, Ophelia, and other Shakespearean heroines.  Particular favorites were as Clara Douglas in Money and as Letitia Hardy in The Belle's Stratagem.
Her popularity and fame increased with every performance.

The actor-manager Joe Cowell wrote about her first appearance in Baltimore: "The captivating Clara Fisher. . . played with me for six weeks to a succession of overflowing houses. Nothing could exceed the enthusiasm with which this most amiable creature was received everywhere. 'Clara Fisher' was the name given to everything it could possibly be applied: to ships, steamboats, racehorses, mint juleps, and negro babies." (Thirty Years Passed Among the Players)

She married James Gaspard Maeder, composer and voice coach, in 1834. Her husband encouraged her musical talents and wrote the opera Peri, or The Enchanted Fountain for her.

She was also admirable in breeches parts (men's roles). Viola was one of her greatest successes, and she was the Fool in William Charles Macready's King Lear.  According to Laurence Hutton, she played Hamlet on at least one occasion.  Her Ophelia was considered one of her finest creations and her Hamlets were played by Charles Kemble, Charles Kean, Edwin Forrest and James Murdoch.

During the depression years after the panic of 1837 (in which she lost, through the collapse of the United States Bank, the fortune she had been accumulating since childhood), she suffered, like many other theatre people of the time, a lapse in her career.   Her last performance at the Park Theatre was in a benefit for her oldest sister in 1844. She and her husband moved to Albany and she appeared only occasionally in New York; a notable date was May 10, 1849, when she played the First Singing Witch in the performance of Macready's Macbeth, which was halted by the Astor Place Riot.

The Maeders returned to New York in 1851. When possible she continued playing with the best stock companies, such as the Globe Theatre in Boston and Louisa Lane Drew's Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia and sometimes she toured. When not performing, she offered lessons in elocution and acting to young ladies aspiring to theatrical careers.

By 1856, in her middle years, she began to assume the line of business called the "old women." For the next thirty years she continued performing, finding a whole new range of roles.  She was cast as Prudence in Matilda Heron's Camille and Juliet's Nurse. She also played the Nurse in the production of Romeo and Juliet which starred Maurice Barrymore and Helena Modjeska.  Her last role was Mrs. Jeremiah Joblots in Augustin Daly's production of The Lottery of Love at Ford's Theatre, Baltimore, in 1889.

Clara and James Maeder had a happy marriage and were the parents of seven children. Two died in infancy, the eldest daughter married a British physician, and the other four were variously connected with the theatre.

Resource:  Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989 ed.  Eugene H. Jones