Wallace, Nellie Jane

Wallace, Nellie Jane [ Eleanor Jane Wallace] (1870–1948), one of the great stars of the English music-hall. Born in Glasgow, she made her first appearance as a clog-dancer in Birmingham in 1888. After touring the ‘halls’ as one of the Three Wallace Sisters, she was seen in the provinces in a series of straight comedies, but returned to the music-halls as a solo turn in the early 1890s, billed as ‘the Essence of Eccentricity’. In her songs and sketches she was invariably the ever-hopeful spinster, seemingly unaware of her shabby clothes and her plain face, plastered with badly-applied make-up, surmounted by a battered hat, and with a moth-eaten feather boa— ‘Me Furs’—twisted round her throat. She would rattle on, equally unaware, it appeared, of the ambiguity of her remarks, until a sudden sideways leer proved the contrary. Her bestknown song was ‘I lost Georgie in Trafalgar Square / Lost ‘im on me’ oneymoon, but I don't care’, in which she was the epitome of the rapacious female on the rampage. A mistress of the grotesque, she was probably the only woman to make a success of the Dame in pantomime, playing the Widow Twankey in Aladdin, the Cook in Dick Whittington, and Dame Durden in Jack and the Beanstalk. In 1935 she gave a superb performance as the Wicked Witch Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty; or, What a Witch. She made her last appearance in 1945.