Theater Career
Frustrated by the futility of one-on-one conversions, and following the advice of an uncle in Chicago, Weber decided to take up acting about 1904, and moved to New York City, where she took some singing lessons. Weber later explained her motivation: "As I was convinced the theatrical profession needed a missionary, he suggested that the best way to reach them was to become one of them so I went on the stage filled with a great desire to convert my fellowman".
For five years Weber was a repertory and stock actress. After short stint as a soubrette in the farce comedy "Zig-Zag" for a Chicago-based touring company, Weber resigned as it "proved too superficial for her altruistic aims". In 1904, Weber joined the road company of "Why Girls Leave Home", where she became "a musical comedy prima donna and melodrama heroine". Weber received "promising reviews" for her performance, for example, The Boston Globe wrote of her in September 1904 that she "sang two very pretty songs very effectively and won considerable applause".
The troupe's leading man and manager was Wendell Phillips Smalley (August 7, 1865 in Brooklyn, New York - May 2, 1939 in Los Angeles, California), a grandson of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the elder son of New York Tribune war and foreign correspondent George Washburn Smalley (born June 2, 1833 in Franklin, Massachusetts; died April 4, 1916 in London, England) and Phoebe Garnaut Phillips (born April 1841 in Massachusetts; died February 1923 in New York City), the adopted daughter of abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Smalley, who had attended Balliol College, Oxford and was a graduate of Harvard University and had been a lawyer in New York for seven years, and had been a stage actor who made his professional stage debut in August 1901 in Manhattan, and had appeared since in productions of Harrison Grey Fiske and Mrs Fiske, and Raymond Hitchcock. After a brief acquaintance, just before her 25th birthday, Weber and Smalley, aged 38, married on April 29, 1904 in Chicago, Illinois.
After initially touring separately from her husband, and then accompanying him on his tours, about 1906 Weber left her career in the theater and became a homemaker in New York. During this period Weber wrote freelance moving picture scenarios.
Read more about this topic: Lois Weber
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