Ada Reeve - Later Years

Later Years

Reeve remarried in 1902 to Wilfred Cotton, a manager and actor who was the uncle of Lily Elsie. That year, she leased the Eden Theatre, Brighton, on behalf of her new husband. However, she caught typhoid fever on a trip to Germany and consequently was too ill to perform that Christmas. Under her husband's management, in 1903, she played Miss Ventnor in The Medal and the Maid. Next, in 1904, she co-produced with her husband, and played the title role in, the play Winnie Brooke, Widow. In 1905, she played the title role in The Adventures of Moll on tour and appeared in Birmingham again as Aladdin in the Christmas pantomime. In 1906, Reeve toured South Africa with her husband, becoming very popular. Back in England, she appeared at the Tivoli and Empire theatres and on tour and, in 1908, played Rhodanthe in the musical Butterflies at the Apollo Theatre, which she produced. In 1909, they toured South Africa again and then toured Butterflies in Britain. She played the title role in the 'Christmas 1908 and 1909 pantomimes of Jack and the Beanstalk, with George Robey as her stage mother.

Over the following years, Reeve played in variety in England and enjoyed extensive and lucrative foreign tours, including South Africa and the U.S. in 1911, South Africa in 1913, Australia in 1914, Australia and South Africa in 1917–1918 (including a return engagement at the Tivoli in Melbourne in You're in Love), South Africa in 1920, Australia and New Zealand from 1922 to 1924 (again often in Aladdin with the Williamson company), and in 1926 and 1929, the last time playing in vaudeville. She was absent from England from 1929 to 1935. In Australia in 1932, she starred in short films produced by Efftee Studios, including two in the "Efftee Entertainers" series of thirty-two films of variety acts from the local stage. The most notable of her Efftee films, however, is "In the Future" (1932), a twelve-minute play that Reeve co-directed with F. W. Thring. The film's central premise is a reversal of traditional gender roles, in which Reeve plays a domineering wife who smokes a cigar and departs for her club while her husband sits at home embroidering. Both of Reeve's daughters, Bessie and Goody, had settled in Australia, where both married and had children, Goody becoming a well known radio personality. Bessie died of an illness in 1954. Upon Ada's return to England, she appeared in cabarets, revues and variety. Her next dramatic role was in 1940 in the musical Black Velvet.

After a few more years on stage, in 1944 Reeve began appearing in films as Mrs. Barley in They Came to a City. She appeared in a total of nine movies and continued her stage work in the 1940s and 1950s. At the age of 80, she retired from the stage but made two more films, the last of which was at the age of 83 in A Passionate Stranger in 1957.

She was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1956 when she was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the King's Theatre, Hammersmith, London.

Ada Reeve died in 1966 at the age of 92.