LEST WE FORGET  MAY IRWIN
(June 27, 1862 - October 22, 1938)

One of the top comediennes of the American stage in the 1880s and 1890s

Born Georgia Campbell in Ontario, Canada, she and her sister Ada never completed their education in order to support their family. Their mother built a stage career for them, remaining dominant in their lives for several years.

The sisters worked together in variety theatres for eight years, beginning in 1875 in Buffalo, New York, for Daniel Shelby, who was responsible for their professional names, "May and Flo, the Irwin Sisters,"
In 1877 they became popular attractions in vaudeville for Tony Pastor in New York.  They broke up as a sister act in 1883 when May made the transition to Broadway in Augustin Daly's company. With Daly's company she supported such famous players as Ada Rehan, John Drew, and Otis Skinner. A decade later Charles Frohman hired her to act with Henry Miller in His Wedding Day and The Junior Partner. She became a special favorite in a travesty of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan called
The Poet and the Puppets, in which she sang the popular song After the Ball.

She gained star status in the 1895 production of John J. McNally's The Widow Jones. A famous scene from this play, a prolonged kiss between May Irwin and John C. Rice, was filmed in close-up for Thomas Edison's "Vitascope" in 1896.   It was the first "shocker' of early motion pictures and was denounced by the clergy of the day.

Lewis C. Strang called her "the personification of humour and careless mirth, a female Falstaff, as it were, whose sixteenth century grossness and ribaldry has been refined and recast in a nineteenth century mould." (Famous Actresses of the Day in America)

Plays written especially for her included: Mrs. Black is Back (1902);
Getting a Polish (1910) by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson; Widow by Proxy (1913); and
No. 13 Washington Square (1915).  A special performance of the last one was done in Washington, D.C. for President Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet, after which Wilson is said to have remarked that he would like to appoint May Irwin  his "Secretary of Laughter."

She regularly introduced new songs in plays written for her or produced by her. Many of these songs were labeled "coon songs," or "shouting songs," as they featured her interpretation of Afro-American singing, picked up, she said from listening to black servants.  These songs which were derived from the old minstrel music and the new ragtime were the craze in the 1890s.

She is also known among American theatre professionals as a successful businesswoman. She wrote and produced some of her plays, she made wise investments in New York real estate and she successfully managed her dairy farm on one of the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence River.  Some estimate that she made more than a million dollars and upon her death in 1938 she was one of the wealthiest women associated with the theatre.