LEST WE FORGET  JULIA DEAN
(July 22, 1830 - March 6, 1868)

"Her soul was in her art."  William Winter

She was born in Pleasant Valley, New Jersey to parents who were also actors. Her grandfather, actor-manager Samuel Drake,
established the midwestern circuit of theatres.

In spite of her family's connections, she started appearing in small parts with Noah Ludlow's theatre company in the Midwest.  Between 1844 and 1845 she performed in Mobile, Alabama as a 'utility' actress earning six dollars a week.

Her friend Joseph Jefferson lll wrote about her in his Autobiography with affection and told how she rose from utility actress to leading lady. When the actress who was to play in Wives as They Were Wives and Maids as They Are fainted and was unable to go on, the prompter suggested Julia Dean.  Years later Jefferson remembered her entrance as Lady Priory:  "The gentle eyes are raised, so full of innocence and truth and now she speaks. . .a voice, so low, so sweet and yet so audible!"

Her New York debut as Julia in Sheridan Knowles's The Hunchback (May 18, 1846) occurred at the Bowery Theatre.  According to the New York Herald she was "gifted by nature with a fine figure--a beautiful and expressive face, a voice of great sweetness and considerable power." It was predicted that she would become one of the greatest and most popular actresses of her time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Belasco

But in 1855 she married Dr. Arthur Hayne, son of a senator from South Carolina. Soon there was a separation which escalated into public gossip and scandal.  Dean lost her public's support. She made plans to retire from the stage, but then accepted an offer to appear in starring roles from her repertoire in San Francisco. An overnight success, West Coast audiences adored her. She performed in California from Sacramento to the mining camps.  
She traveled as far north as Victoria, British Columbia, where she appeared on stage with a very young David Belasco.  Dewitt Bodeen claimed that "every man was at her feet--from the coarse Sierra miner to the gilded youth of San Francisco."  (Ladies of the Footlights).

After her divorce became final in 1866, she returned to New York, but her earlier brilliance seemed to have diminished.   George C. D. Odell recorded that she was "no longer the radiant star of earlier years, but the saddened woman and rather coarsened artist, whose later work her former admirers deplored."
(Annals of the New York Stage, Vol. VI).

She was highly regarded for her natural style in such roles as Julia (The Hunchback), Juliet, Pauline (Lady of Lyons), and Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing).    William Winter summed up her accomplishments in Brief Chronicles: "In person, Julia Dean was tall, stately, graceful, and interesting. Her voice was sweetly plaintive, the soft and gentle expression of her countenance harmonized with her voice.  As an actress, while she always manifested a quick imagination and gave a sense of power, she was not successful in delineating gentle phrases of character and emotion and the milder aspects of human experience. . . Whatever she did was earnestly done. Her soul was in her art, and she neither did nor suffered anything to degrade it."

Resource:  Notable Women in the American Theatre.  Susan S. Cole