Born 150 Years Ago: Jessie Bonstelle, Pioneering Female Actor-Manager

Born 150 years ago this month: Jessie Bonstelle (Laura Justine Bonesteel, 1871-1932).

Raised in Greece, New York (near Rochester), Bonstelle grew up attending local theatres, and was tutored in thespian skills by her mother, a former theatrical aspirant. Her first professional roles occurred with stock companies in her childhood. In her early 20s, she acted with the companies of Augustin Daly and  Fanny Janauschek, whose leading man Alexander Hamilton (“A.H.”) Stuart she married. The pair became a stage couple, strarring with companies in Philadelphia and Rochester. From around the turn of the century she began managing companies in those towns, as well as Buffalo and Detroit. On Broadway she appeared in The Great Question (1908), The Wedding Day (1909), and The Faith Healer (1910), the latter with Laura Hope Crews. Stuart died in 1911, and Bonstelle dove still deeper into her career as an actor/manager. William Brady backed her 1912 adaptation of Little Women, her most successful Broadway show. She also directed and/or produced The Lady from Oklahoma (1913), A King of Nowhere (1916), Good Morning Rosamond (1917), Home Again (1918), The Triumph of X (1921), and The Enchanted Cottage (1923).

In 1925 Bonstelle started The Bonstelle Playhouse in Detroit, which later became known as the Detroit Civic Theatre. She presented affordable productions of classics, and became a beloved character in her adopted city. When she died in 1932, 25,000 mourners paid their respects. The theatre was later incorporated into Wayne State University. (The similarly named Detroit Civic Theatre, a cinema, founded in 1941, is a different building.) Some of the notable people who worked with Bonstelle over the years included William Powell,Katharine Cornell, Margaret Wycherly,Alice Brady, and John McCabe. At any rate, Bonstelle’s career would come to be regarded as an important precursor to the Federal Theatre Project as well as the regional theatre movement.