Grace Reals

Biography

A crisp winter in 1866 delivered Grace Reals to the gas-lit avenues of New York; by the time the city’s first skyscrapers scraped the clouds she had become its whispered-about stage marvel. Cameras soon pivoted her way: she stalked through 1916’s Sherlock Holmes as the detective’s quick-witted foil, traded barbed banter in 1919’s Oh Boy!, and stared down moral hypocrisy in 1918’s The Eleventh Commandment. Though the final curtain rang down on 30 August 1925, the reels still spin, keeping her very much alive in the dark of a theatre.