Louisa Lane Drew

Louisa Lane was born January 10, 1820 in Lambeth Parish,London, England, as the daughter of Eliza Trentner (1796-1887), a singer and actress, and Thomas Frederick Lane (1796-1835), an actor and theatre manager.^[3][4][5][6] Lane's paternal grandparents, Thomas Haycraft Lane and Louisa Rouse, were also actors. Lane made her stage debut when she was just twelve months old alongside her mother in a production of Giovanni in London.^[7][8] She acted in a number of roles during her childhood, including Meg Murnock and a production of Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, where she portrayed the scientist's younger brother and acted alongside T.P. Cooke.^[9] This was the first recorded theatrical adaptation of the novel.^[10]

Her father died around 1826,^[11] prompting Lane and her mother to sail to the Americas the following year and arrived in New York on June 7, 1827.^[12] She made her American stage debut in September 1827, as Margaretta in No Song, No Supper, at the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia. Later that month, she would also appear as the young Duke of York in Richard III, alongside Junius Brutus Booth.^[13] Her New York stage debut would happen in March 1828 at the Bowery Theater, where she led as Little Pickle in The Spoiled Child.^[2] She proved to be a child prodigy playing five different adult roles within one play at the age of eight in 1828.

Her mother remarried in 1828 to English actor and stage manager John Kinlock. She would gain three half-sisters, Adine (b. 1827), Georgiana (b.1829), and Rosalie Kinlock (b. 1830). The family set sail to Jamaica in November 1830 with Kinlock attempting to find better job opportunities.^[14][15] The ship wrecked, leaving the family and all passengers stranded for six weeks in San Domingo. Lane celebrated her 11th birthday stranded before eventually being rescued and taken to Kingston, Jamaica.^[16]

In 1831, Kinlock and baby Rosalie died of yellow fever while in Jamaica.^[17][18] Trenter also became sickly, however recovered the following year and returned the family to Philadelphia.^[19] Her mother took her and Adine on another voyage to the West Indies in 1833, however the ship would once again wreck on a sandbar in Egg Harbor, West Indies. The family was eventually rescued and took a "wood boat" back to New York.^[20]

In 1833, Lane began touring the United States with the Bowery Theater Stock Company. She often acted in male roles, such as Romeo, Mark Antony, and other Shakespearan characters. By 1836, she was playing a leading lady opposite of Edwin Forrest.^[21] That year, she married actor Henry Blaine Hunt and the couple, along with her mother, did traveling performances. Lane was praised for her work and gained recognition in a number of papers. The Louisana Courier wrote that she would "in time, decorate her young brow with that brightest and most durable coronal of worth - public approval."^[22]

In 1838, she was employed as an actress at the Walnut Street Theatre, where she stayed on rotation until 1850. She would be paid $20 a week, the highest salary paid there at the time.^[21] During her time there, she would perform alongside a number of high-profile actors - Tyrone Power, Ellen Tree, Mary Ann Vincent, Charlotte Cushman, the Booths, Fanny Davenport, and more.^[23]

In 1836, at the age 16, Lane married Irish actor Henry Blaine Hunt, who was 40 years old. They would divorce in 1847^[39] and Lane remarried to Irish singer and comedian George Messop in 1848.^[21] Messop would die the following year. In 1850, she would marry her third husband, Irish-American actor John Drew.^[2][19] She and Drew would have three children together - Louisa Eliza, John Jr., and Georgiana. She had no known children from her first two marriages.

After her husband's 1862 death, Lane reportedly adopted a baby boy and named him Sidney Drew. Despite Lane's claims, her own family and modern critics believe that Sidney was Lane's biological son of an affair with actor Robert Craig. According to biographer James Kotsilibas-Davis, Craig and Lane spent a notable amount of time together before he suddenly was fired from the Arch Street company. Lane then left Philadelphia for a considerable amount of time before returning with Sidney. Ethel Barrymore, Lane's grandaughter, wrote in her autobiography "Sidney may not have been the son of John Drew, but he was indubitably the son of Mrs. John Drew.” ^[40][41]

Lane's sister, popular actress Georgina Kinlock, would die in 1864. Her mother, Eliza, would die years later in 1887 at the age of 92.^[42]

When her daughter, Georgiana, died in 1893, Lane took responsibility for the three children, while their father, Maurice Barrymore, remained on tour. Eventually Lane would give up their Philadelphia residence and move into a boardinghouse. The children were sent to live with their Uncle Sidney (referred to as Uncle Googan)^[43] and his family.^[44]

In 1897, an ailing Louisa Drew spent her last summer at her annual retreat at Larchmont, in upstate New York, with her young grandsons Lionel and John Barrymore.

Louisa Drew died on August 31, 1897, at the age of 77 years at her country estate retreat in Larchmont, New York of Westchester County, and her body was initially interred at the Glenwood Cemetery^[45] and eventually later moved to the Mount Vernon Cemetery, both cemeteries on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.