Bates, Blanche

Bates, Blanche (1873–1941), actress. The daughter of a theatre manager and an actress, she was born in Portland, Oregon, and made her debut in San Francisco in 1894 as Mrs. Willoughby in The Picture, and then spent several seasons there in T. D. Frawley's stock company. Bates made her New York debut in 1897 as Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew with Augustin Daly's company, later playing such roles as Celia in As You Like It and Lady Sneerwell in The School for Scandal. She first called real attention to herself as Hannah Jacobs in The Children of the Ghetto (1899). Coming under David Belasco's management, Bates played briefly as the flirtatious model Cora in Naughty Anthony (1900), then won wide acclaim as Cho‐Cho‐San in Madame Butterfly. Other notable performances at the turn of the century include the Foreign Legion camp follower Cigarette in Under Two Flags (1910); the forlorn Oriental Yo‐San in The Darling of the Gods; frontier tavern owner Minnie in The Girl of the Golden West (1905); Anna, the wife who destroys the evidence against her embezzling husband, in The Fighting Hope (1908); and Roxanna Clayton, who cannot rid herself of a philandering mate, in Nobody's Widow (1910). Leaving Belasco's management, Bates appeared in Diplomacy (1914), Getting Together (1918), and Medea (1919), performing in vaudeville between legitimate assignments. Among her late successes were the liberated Nancy Fair in The Famous Mrs. Fair (1919); Karen Aldcroft in a play about wife‐switching, The Changelings (1923); and Maisie Partridge, the domineering mother, in Mrs. Partridge Presents (1925). After performing in repertory on the West Coast, Bates temporarily retired, only to return in 1933 to tour as Maud Mockridge, the dinner guest, in Dangerous Corner. Her last New York appearance was in 1933 as Lena, a small role in The Lake. When she appeared in The Darling of the Gods, the Times wrote of the “dark, animated” performer: “The acting of Miss Blanche Bates has, all along, shown a sweet wildness of impulse, a freedom of abandonment, a delightful impetuosity of feeling . . . spontaneous, graceful, alert with vigor and free from all restraint of self‐consciousness and finical prudery.”