Louise Gunning

Gunning was born on April 1, 1878, in Boston, Massachusetts,^[1] and later lived in Brooklyn, New York, where her father was a Baptist minister. Her mother, Mary Gunning, was a choir director who, besides her daughter, also trained the silent film actress Lucille Lee Stewart.^[2] Gunning made her first stage appearances as a chorus singer in a Frank Daniels show and later as a solo act singing Scottish ballads. In 1897 (around the time of her parents' divorce)^[3] she appeared in a New York production of The Circus Girl, followed in rapid succession by performances in the Charles H. Hoyt farce comedies A Stranger in New York, A Milk White Flag and A Day and a Night. In the fall of 1899 she sang in the Rogers Brothers hit farce musical The Roger Brothers in Wall Street at the old Victoria Theatre, New York.^{[4][5][6][7][8]}

In 1902 Gunning sang It Seems Like Yesterday in the Isidore Witmark and Frederic Ranken musical comedy The Chaperons at the Cherry Blossom Theatre, Washington, D. C. and the following year at the Herald Square Theatre she played Arabella in the musical Mr. Pickwick, from the Charles Dickens novel The Pickwick Papers. By the fall of 1903 Gunning was touring with Frank Daniel's company playing Euphemia in The Office Boy by Engländer and Smith,^[9] and the following year she appeared at the Broadway Theatre as Laura Skeffington in the Stang and Edwards musical comedy, Love's Lottery. Gunning was Pepi Gloeckner in The White Hen by Gustave Kerker and Roderic C. Penfield in February 1906 at the Casino Theatre, and later that year starred in vaudeville with the Shubert organization in the light opera Véronique. She played Sophia in November 1907 in the comic opera Tom Jones at the Astor Theatre, and in October 1908 the title role in the Frank Pixley and Gustave Luders comic operetta, Marcelle, staged at the Casino Theatre.^[6][8]

In February 1911, Gunning first played in The Balkan Princess as Princess Stephanie at the Herald Square Theatre, and then continued the run the following week at the Casino Theatre before embarking on a long tour later in the year. In May 1911 Gunning played Josephine in a two-month revival of H.M.S. Pinafore at the Casino Theatre and, at the Broadway Theatre in March 1913, she was Annabel Vandeveer in The American Maid, a short-lived comic opera by John Philip Sousa and Leonard Liebling. She joined the stock company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in May 1914, to guest star as Mary in Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway.^[6][8] Reportedly Gunning was forced to cancel a European tour and return to America when in 1914 war threatened the continent.^[10] In 1915 she began a series of vaudeville singing engagements that would continue into the early 1920s.^[11]