BREESE EMULATED ANANIAS.
Former Farm Boy and Swimming Instructor
Told a Weird Yarn About Francis
Wilson to Get Behind Footlights.
Some very unusual experiences form the foundation-stones upon which rests the stage career of Edmund Breese, who has become widely known for his work as the Lion (a multimillionaire supposed to typify Rockefeller) in the season's success, "The Lion and the Mouse."
Breese was a Brooklyn boy, with no tinge of the theater in any of his forebears or surroundings. Before he reached his 'teens the members of his family were in the habit of making frequent trips to Atlantic City, via Philadelphia, where they had relatives, who now and then took young Edmund to the play.
On one of these journeys the boy chanced to spy a notice outside the Eleventh Street Opera House, where the Carncross Minstrels were holding forth. This announced that a number of boys were wanted for a certain production about to be made. Instantly young Breese was fired with the determination to apply for a job on the stage.
Presenting himself at the box-office he made known his desires. A man inside looked him over and said he thought he would do, and told him to present himself on a certain day in the following week. Breese returned home to Brooklyn all aglow with anticipation, informed his mother of his good luck, and—well, was made very clearly to realize that school and home and the keeping of early hours were his métier just then.
It was some little time after this stirring of the Thespian bug in his blood that he received another inoculation—also in the City of Brotherly Love. He saw Dore Davidson in a performance of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and the characterization made such an impression on him that after he reached home he took the first opportunity of showing his mother a duplication of it.
At first she listened with the complaisant toleration of a parent anxious to appear interested in a child's enthusiasms, but presently young Breese became aware that she was following his depiction with absorbed attention.
"I really must have it in me to do something in the acting-line," he told himself.