page_title: Nance O'Neil
section_title: Stage Career
hierarchical_section_title: Nance O'Neil / Stage Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Nance O'Neil ca. 1903. In Sunset Magazine May-October 1903 issue.
context_page_description: Gertrude Lamson, known professionally as Nance O'Neil or Nancy O'Neil, was an American stage and film actress who performed in plays in various theatres around the world but worked predominantly in the United States between the 1890s and 1930s. At the height of her career, she was promoted on theatre bills and in period trade publications and newspapers as the "American Bernhardt".
context_section_description: O'Neil's first performance in a professional production was in the role of a nun in Sarah at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco on October 16, 1893. Before returning to San Francisco in 1898 and 1899 as a star, headlining in the plays The Jewess and The Shadow, she spent the preceding years honing her acting skills by playing in every type of venue, "from barns to first-class theatres", in towns throughout the country's West and Northwest. O'Neil later described that early period of her career as a time when she appeared "in fully a hundred characters, varying from soubrettes to heavies." 
  As her celebrity grew, after her success in San Francisco, O'Neil embarked on an around-the-world tour, performing in Hawaii, Australia, Egypt, and in many other locations overseas. Those extensive travels and stage appearances were managed by McKee Rankin—an actor, manager, and producer—who was instrumental in also making her a star in Australia and in overseeing her London debut at the Adelphi Theatre on September 1, 1902 in the play Magda. The next day, back in the United States, The New York Times reported on that important performance in England, noting that in the early acts of the play O'Neil "gave an  intense, imperious and unequal rendering of the part." The newspaper, however, then added that the actress's "nervousness" later eased on stage and she "aroused the big audience to enthusiasm in the climax of the third act, and obtained a good reception." Unfortunately, two other plays in which O'Neil also starred in London that same month—Camille and Elizabeth, Queen of England—were poorly received by English critics and forced her to terminate early her plans for additional engagements there in October 1902. The London Times wholly dismissed her company's presentation of Camille as "flauntingly, overwhelming provincial" and criticised her performance in Elizabeth, Queen of England as "lacking tenderness".
  
  In 1906, in her role as the title character in an adaptation of Leah, the Forsaken, O'Neil recreated the role made famous by Italian actress Adelaide Ristori. Her performances in Leah (an adaptation of a translation of Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal's Deborah) were described as "genius" by Fremont Older. She also appeared in Trilby, Camille, The Common Standard, The Wanderer, Macbeth, Agnes, Sappho, The Passion Flower, Hedda Gabler, and many other productions in the United States and Europe. In 1908 a theatre critic for The New York Times shared his opinions regarding O'Neil's acting talents, providing what he viewed as both the strengths and weaknesses of her performances:
  There is no actress on the stage at present who has a more remarkable gift for emotional expression, nor is there a single one who has been more lavishly endowed by nature with the physical gifts which enter into the equipment of great actresses....Miss O'Neil has a kind of massive beauty, and she is not without much natural grace. Her voice is a splendid organ, rich and deep, with plenty of color and sweetness. There are moments when it is expressive of deep feeling. But there are more extended periods when it is pitched in monotonous cadences, during which the actress speaks seem to be delivered without a hint of genuine feeling or understanding, when, in short, she is simply an actress giving voice to words that she has conned and learned by rote and delivered in a sort of phonographic manner without a suggestion of the thought behind them.
  The statuesque O'Neil performed in Louisville, Kentucky, opposite such actors as Wilton Lackaye, Edmund Breese, William Faversham, Tom Wise and Harriet E. MacGibbon. There were regular productions, including Ned McCobb's Daughter, The Front Page, The Big Fight. A "transcontinental tour" of The Big Fight began in Boston, took in New Haven and Hartford, and ended at Caine's storehouse. She also acted in plays by Shakespeare and Ibsen in Boston in the late 1920s. On November 29, 1922, she was featured at the opening night of the Columbia Theatre in Sharon, Pennsylvania. For a period in the early 1900s, O'Neil owned her 
caption: Sunset Magazine, May-October, 1903
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