Anna Laughlin

Biography

Six-year-old Anna Stapleton Laughlin first stepped into the glare of footlights as a vaudevillian mite who could make Shakespeare sound like child’s play; billing offices soon shortened her name to the irresistible “Wee Little Anna.” By 1900 the prodigy had traded sawdust for Broadway, debuting in The Belle of Bohemia. Two seasons later, still only eighteen, she slipped on a checkered pinafore and clicked the heels of theatrical history as the original Dorothy Gale in the 1902 musicalization of The Wizard of Oz. The show’s two-year run turned her into the town’s favorite Kansas girl. Love arrived offstage in the form of New York diamond dealer Dwight “Van” Monroe; they married on a sweltering July 12, 1904. Daughter Lucy followed in 1906, and motherhood briefly eclipsed the spotlight—until 1907, when Anna re-ascended in The Top O’ The World, then toured a one-woman variety bill that reviewers crowned with superlatives for both chiseled beauty and velvet-lined soprano. Hollywood beckoned in 1913; Reliance Pictures handed her the reins of The Rebellious Pupil and, over the next twenty-four months, she clocked more than a dozen screen credits—The Janitor, The Greyhound, The Crown Prince’s Double among them. Yet celluloid’s siren call faded against the tug of bedtime stories; she retired in 1915 after completing The Amazing Mr. Fellman to devote every curtain call to raising Lucy. Fate struck a merciless blow in January 1921 when Van succumbed to complications from an appendectomy. Anna poured her resilience into guiding Lucy’s vocal gifts, and by the early thirties mother and daughter harmonized over nationwide airwaves. Their joint stage appearance in 1935 seemed the pinnacle of their bond—until, two years later, the duet fractured into silence. Lucy stayed away; Anna sank into a shadowed apartment on East Fifty-First Street. On the morning of April 5, 1937, the gas jet whispered its lethal lullaby. She was fifty-three. A three-page farewell trembled with heartbreak: “This is good-bye. People are dreadful. I love my child … Where did I fail?” She was laid to rest beside Van beneath the quiet maples of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.