"It rarely happens that an actress scores a success so unostentatiously as Miss Margaret Anglin. All that had previously been known of her were the facts that she was a Canadian, and that last season, while understudy in the Sothern company, she played Lady Ursula in Hope's play with such amazing success that it compelled Miss Virginia Harned to recover from a somewhat serious illness and resume her rôle after missing one performance. When Miss Anglin first appeared as Roxane last night, a sigh went up from all parts of the house: 'Here's another blond and simpering ingénue.'
"But as soon as she spoke Miss Anglin arrested attention. Her voice was charming, and she moved about the stage with an ease which showed that, however short her training may have been, she was in every sense an experienced actress. As the play progressed, this young girl, who has neither beauty nor a fine stage presence to assist her, fairly captivated the audience by the grace and tenderness with which she invested a most thankless and trying rôle."
Thus was Miss Anglin started on a career in which she has taken no backward step. On the night before the twentieth century came in, when, as leading woman of the Empire stock, she came forward in "Mrs. Dane's Defense," she justified every prediction that had ever been made regarding the trend of her attainments, which she had varied since the Roxane days, by proving herself an exquisitely pathetic Mimi with Henry Miller in "The Only Way." And during the present season as the star Zira in Wilkie Collins's revamped "New Magdalen" she kept people coming to the Princess from September until the middle of January.
How did she obtain her opening in the first instance, you ask? I had the reply to this from her own lips for the benefit of The Scrap Book audience.
"I had the ambition to become a professional reader. Rather an absurd one, wasn't it? The stage itself seemed to hold no special lure for me. Well, after some opposition on the part of my family, I came to New York at seventeen, with money enough to pay for a season's tuition at a school of acting, which had just been opened in connection with the Empire Theater.
"I was one of the very first pupils to be enrolled, and in spite of my indifference to the theatrical side of elocution I could not but be dazzled by the bait which Charles Frohman dangled before the eyes of the students. This was the promise of an engagement to four of the pupils who should acquit themselves with the most credit at the public performances of the school.
"The crucial afternoon arrived, and I went through my part. I dare say Mr. Wheatcroft, our principal, was more excited than I, as it was the initial performance of his pupils, and I knew that I had several other opportunities in which to make good in case my part did not show me up to the best advantage on the present occasion. Judge of my amazement, then, when word came from Mr. Frohman that he stood ready to give me the part of Mildred West in 'Shenandoah' right away.
"To be sure, it was only a tiny rôle, but in my recollection now it bulks big, as it proved the gateway to a career which I had no idea of following when I paid down my four hundred dollars for a year's tuition in the dramatic school."
MRS. CARTER'S HARD FIGHT.
Compelled to Earn Her Own Living, She
Had Difficulty in Persuading Managers
to Give Her a Hearing.