Shannon, Effie

Shannon, Effie (1867–1954), actress. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she began a stage career that was to span seventy years when she appeared as a child extra in John McCullough's production of Coriolanus in Boston in the early 1870s. Her first important assignment followed shortly, when she portrayed Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Billed as La Petite Shannon, she grew up to be a tall, slim beauty. After her first New York assignment in 1886 in Tangled Lives, Shannon played for a time for Augustin Daly, including Titania in his 1888 mounting of A Midsummer Night's Dream. A year later she created the role of Jenny Buckthorn in Shenandoah, and in the 1890s she supported Rose Coghlan and Lillie Langtry. Stardom came when she played opposite her husband, Herbert Kelcey, in The Moth and the Flame (1898), followed by another success as Indiana Stillwater in Her Lord and Master (1902). In 1907 she was Blanche in the first American performance of Shaw's Widowers' Houses, after which she toured for two years as Marie‐Louise in The Thief. Shannon's other notable later performances included the stern maiden aunt Miss Harrington in Pollyanna (1916), the dual roles of the German and American wives in the war play Under Orders (1918), the first American Hesione Hushabye in Heartbreak House (1920), Mrs. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer (1924), Mrs. Winslow in The Youngest (1924), Trafalgar Gower in Trelawny of the Wells (1927), and Esther Crampton in Morning's at Seven (1939). In 1942 Shannon replaced Jean Adair as sweet murderer Martha Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace and played the role until her retirement two years later.