The theatre of science; a volume of progress and achievement in the motion picture industry (1914)

of%>cience 153 efforts in working to get the correct interpretations of the characters he was given to portray, combined with his stock personaUty, made his rise to stardom very rapid. Lottie Briscoe has been on the stage since she was four years of age, and has had the good fortune during that time to have been in the companies of the leading actors of the past fifteen years. She made her first appearance with McKee Rankin in "Nobody's Wife," in 1896, playing on her first appearance a part of forty-two pages. After that she starred for three seasons as Editha in "Editha's Burglar" (in which role the writer first saw her act), and then went out for a preliminary trip with Russ V/hytal, as his co-star in "For Fair Virginia," which proved such a success that it was brought into New York and made her a Broadway star at the age of seven. At the conclusion of that run Miss Briscoe was next engaged by Augustin Daly to support Miss Ada Rehan, making her first appearance at Daly's Theatre as Puck in "A Midsummer-Night's Dream." She was a great pet of Mr. Daly's, who, after the rehearsals were over, would draw up a chair for Miss Rehan and then get little Lottie to come on the stage and sing to him song after song in German and French. One engagement led to another, and from Daly's she joined Richard Mansfield, to whose careful tuition and direction she probably owes most of her excellent stage technic. She played the Prince in "Richard III," and under Mansfield's management was the original Essie in George Bernard Shaw's first production in this country of "The Devil's Disciple." Mr. Mansfield became very fond of her and wished to adopt her, but her mother, who always traveled with her, refused to listen to