She followed her year in Louisville with two seasons (1876–8) as a member of John W. Albaugh’s company in Albany.[133] Here it was, in December, 1877, while she was playing Bianca in Katherine and Petruchio,[134] that Augustin Daly first saw her and observed her exceptional talent.
At the end of her service with Mr. Albaugh she was but twenty-three. And yet she had been a regularly engaged professional actress for five years, had played Ophelia to Booth’s Hamlet and Lady Anne to John McCullough’s Richard III, besides acting at various times Cordelia in Lear, Desdemona in Othello, Celia in As You Like It, and Olivia in Twelfth Night, and had appeared not only with Booth and McCullough but with Adelaide Neilson, Lawrence Barrett, John Brougham, John T. Raymond, and many of the other “stars” of the day.[135]
Next, during the season of 1878–79, Miss Rehan was for a brief period in the company of Fanny Davenport. In the course of this engagement a now forgotten play, Pique, was acted by Miss Davenport, and Ada Rehan was given the part of Mary Standish. The author of the play was Augustin Daly. When it was given at the Grand Opera House in New York, in April, 1879, Mr. Daly again was struck by the promise of the young actress whom he had seen as Bianca in Albany a year and a half before. Immediately he placed her under his management and gave her the part of Big Clémence in his own version of Zola’s L’Assommoir, which he produced at the Olympic Theatre the following month. It was a small part, she did it well, and within a few weeks was promoted to the part of Virginie. In September of the same year she appeared for the first time on the stage of Daly’s Theatre, which was built, oddly enough, on the site of Wood’s Museum,[136] where six years ago she had acted her small part in The Thoroughbred. It is worth mentioning that the first parts—both in September, 1879—in the long list, literally of hundreds, that she was to act during her twenty years with Mr. Daly were Nelly Beers in Love’s Young Dream, and Lu Ten Eyck in Divorce.
With Ada Rehan the leading woman of the reorganized Daly company there began a new era in her career, in Mr. Daly’s, and, it is fair to say, in American acting. Until Mr. Daly’s death in 1899 Miss Rehan retained her position, and in that time she progressed from obscurity to the position of one of the leading actresses of her day, famous alike in America and England, and famous even on the continent of Europe. With Mr. Daly’s death, though she continued to act and to act well, there passed the period of her peculiar fame, and in a half-dozen years she had ceased to act altogether.
Such, in bald and brief outline, has been Rehan’s career. Of the struggles, the aspirations, the triumphs of an actress, of her life, in short, any mere record can tell but little.
What sort of woman was Ada Rehan? Well, she was of the royal line of women, regal in her stature, opulent in bodily beauty, gracious and rich in her nature. Her face, like her careless joyousness and exuberant animal spirits, was Celtic. She was not beautiful in the conventional sense, but as with Ellen Terry, simple beauty paled beside her. Her hair was exuberant too, and brown, except where, in the middle of her career, it became streaked with gray. She had the gray-blue Irish eye. “What a great woman she was!” wrote one of her more rhapsodic admirers.[137] “Tall, easy, almost majestic, except that the geniality of her manner took from majesty its aloofness and pride. When she spoke her voice came out mellifluently, so that without forcing it seemed to pervade the room. It had something of the quality of a blackbird’s note. Ada Rehan is not at all of a classic type of countenance. She is genuine Celtic. To call her pretty would be ridiculous, for prettiness is something that seems to dwindle beside her. To call her beautiful would be neither completely expressive nor apt, for her features have the warp of too many conflicting, irrepressible emotions, and the turn of what one feels tempted to call rale ould Irish humor. Yet the eyes, and the brow, and the head are beautiful—the eyes especially, with their soft, lamp-like, mellow glow, with their sharp, fiery glints, with their gorgon directness, or again with their innumerable little twinkles of fun and sly melting shadows, with the flashing from the lids and the eyelashes of light, or the deep, still beaming that perhaps most eloquently of all speaks of soul.” These are high words, indeed, but they had much provocation.
All these things, and more, Rehan appeared across the footlights. Off the stage, simply as Ada Rehan, she was still the exceptional woman. An actress who is capable of diverse and subtle characterizations is often, singularly enough, in her own person a woman of essential simplicity. Such seems to have been the case with Ada Rehan. Her lack of pose can be glimpsed in various ways, in her capacity for pleasure in the success of others, her ability to see and admire beauty and talent in other women,—a severe test for any actress. “She was generous and grateful, and she never forgot a kindness,” says Mr. Winter. “Her mind was free from envy and bitterness ... and she never spoke an ill word of anybody.” One more evidence of her simplicity was her un-Bernhardtian sense of contentment in the limited opportunities for personal glorification afforded by her position with Mr. Daly. As we shall see, she refused numbers of offers to star, preferring the comparative obscurity of her position as “Daly’s leading woman.” Notice the phrases of a writer in the Sun, who observed her on the street in New York in 1894, after her return from triumphant appearances in London. “She exhibits a degree of calm serenity that might almost be called matronly.... Her face wears a youthful and almost childish expression.... Much of her time has been spent since her return in looking in the shop windows, but apparently she has not purchased much, either here or in Europe, as her attire is invariably that of a woman who devotes little thought to dress!” But this writer goes on to say: “No one would be likely to mistake her for anything but an actress nowadays. Her distinction of bearing is so great that, even if her face were not familiar to the public, a great many people would turn around to look at her a second time as she walks along the street.”
Her early education was inconsiderable, and we are told that even during her brief career in school she cared less for her lessons than for romping with her three brothers,—a course that may not have been without its value in preparing her for her success as Katherine and Peggy Thrift. Later, however, she read much. She liked Thackeray, and she particularly admired Balzac. “Her knowledge of human nature,—gained partly by keen intuition and partly by close observance,—was ample, various, and sound,” wrote William Winter, who knew her well. “Her thoughts, and often her talk, dwelt upon traits of character, fabrics of art, and beauties of nature, and she loved rather to speak of these than of the commonplaces and practical affairs of the passing day. Her grasp of character was intuitive; she judged rightly, and she was seldom or never mistaken in her estimate of individuals. Her perception was exceedingly acute, and she noted, instantly and correctly, every essential trait, however slight, of each person who approached her presence. She was intrinsically sincere, modest, and humble—neither setting a great value on herself nor esteeming her powers and achievements to be unusual; she has been known to be in tears, at what she deemed a professional failure, while a brilliant throng of friends was waiting to congratulate her on an unequivocal success.”
Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Winter has poured out his praise with a lavish hand. Yet it is clear that Ada Rehan added many fine qualities, for those who knew her, to those qualities known to all who saw her: vitality, a true sense of comedy, personal charm.
For a long time newspaper interviewers had the greatest difficulty in getting Miss Rehan to talk for them. Like Duse and Mrs. Fiske, she loathed the interview. By nature she was, within the circle of her friends, candid and ingenuous, talking freely, stating frankly her opinions and drawing freely from a fund of interesting anecdotes about the personages she met and knew on both sides of the ocean. It is related that during her first visit to London, she met at a dinner an editor with whom she talked in her characteristic manner. He printed all she said. Though she was of a kindly disposition and had said nothing uncomfortable, she was annoyed by the incident, and for years avoided journalists.[138]