Nancy Hallam (died after 1773) was an English-born American stage actress and singer. She was engaged in the Old American Company, the first permanent theater company in America, and as such belonged to the first generation of pioneer actresses in North America.
Nancy Hallam was the niece of Sarah Hallam and a cousin of Isabella Mattocks. She was engaged in the American Company as a child. In 1760, she returned to Great Britain to be trained as a singer. In 1765, she returned to America with David Douglass after his visit to England to recruit new actors.
Hallam became known for her Shakespearean roles and for her ability as a singer. When Margaret Cheer retired and left the company in 1769, Nancy Hallam took over the principal female roles from her as well as from Sarah Hallam Douglass. She became a very popular actress and singer of the American colonial stage, and idolized on stage. Her likely most famous role was the crossdressing role in Cymbeline, which she performed the first time in the New Theatre in Annapolis in 1770.
She returned to Great Britain in 1773.
Nancy Hallam is the subject of a famous painting by Charles Willson Peale.
Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage actress who starred in some of the most popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She played female and male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture", and Hugo praised her "golden voice". She made several theatrical tours worldwide and was one of the early prominent actresses to make sound recordings and act in motion pictures.
Dame Alice Ellen Terry was a leading English actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Sarah Siddons was a Welsh actress, the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century. Contemporaneous critic William Hazlitt dubbed Siddons as "tragedy personified".
Lillian Russell was an American actress and singer. She became one of the most famous actresses and singers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, praised for her beauty and style, as well as for her voice and stage presence.
Roger Kemble was an English theatre manager, strolling player and actor. In 1753, he married Irish actress Sarah "Sally" Ward (1735–1806) at Cirencester in Gloucestershire, and they had thirteen children, who formed the Kemble family of 19th-century actors and actresses.
The Old American Company was an American theatre company. It was the first fully professional theatre company to perform in North America. It also played a vital role in the theatre history of Jamaica. It was founded in 1752 and disbanded in 1805. It was known as the Hallam Company (1752–1758), the American Company (1758–1785) and the Old American Company (1785–1805). With a few temporary exceptions, the Company enjoyed a de facto monopoly of professional theatre in the United States until 1790.
Ann Cargill was a British opera diva and celebrated beauty whose life and death were a sensation in London at the close of the 18th century.
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 theaters 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 theater bills and in period trade publications and newspapers as the "American Bernhardt".
Nancy Isobel McIntosh was an American-born singer and actress who performed mostly on the London stage. Her father was a member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which had been blamed in connection with the 1889 Johnstown Flood that resulted in the loss of over 2,200 lives in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Inga Åberg was a Swedish actress and opera singer. She was engaged as an opera singer at the Royal Swedish Opera, and as a stage actress at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, between 1787 and 1810.
Lewis Hallam was an English-born actor and theatre director in the colonial United States.
Thomas Wignell was an English-born actor and theatre manager in the colonial United States.
Lewis Hallam Jr. was an England-born American actor and theater manager, son of Lewis Hallam, one of the pioneers of Theater in the United States, and Sarah Hallam Douglass. He was the leading actor of the Old American Company, at the time the only theater in America, and the manager of the same Company in 1779-1796.
Sarah Thorne was a British actress and actress-manager of the 19th century who managed the Theatre Royal at Margate for many years. She ran a school for acting there which is widely regarded as Britain's first formal drama school. The Sarah Thorne Theatre Club in Broadstairs is named in her memory.
John Street Theatre, situated at 15–21 John Street, sometimes called "The Birthplace of American Theatre", was the first permanent theatre in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York. It opened on December 7, 1767, and was operated for several decades by the American Company. It closed on January 13, 1798.
Isabella Hill, better known as Mrs Howard Paul, was an English actress, operatic singer and actress-manager of the Victorian era, best remembered for creating the role of Lady Sangazure in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera The Sorcerer (1877).
Sarah Hallam Douglass was an English-born American stage actress and theatre director. She was known as Mrs Lewis Hallam and Sarah Hallam.
Margaret Cheer, was an English-born American stage actress known as Miss Cheer. She was engaged in the Old American Company, the first permanent theater company in America, and as such belonged to the first generation of pioneer actresses in North America.
Eliza Hallam née Tuke, was an American stage actress.
David Douglass, was a British-American stage actor and theatre manager. He was the managing director of the Old American Company between 1758 and 1779.