Madeline Fairbanks

Biography

November 15, 1900: a New York morning delivered identical Fairbanks girls, Madeleine the second to blink into the world. Before kindergarten, she and Marion were already trading the nursery for footlights, charming Gotham in plays that tumbled one after another—Claudia, The Prince Chap, Mary Jane’s Pa, The Piper, Snow White, The Blue Bird—at the New Theatre and the pocket-sized Little Theatre, where applause knew their names by heart. About 1910 the sisters slipped into flickers via Biograph, though the studio’s stubborn anonymity kept their faces famous and their names secret. Two years later they boarded the Thanhouser train in nearby New Rochelle, were christened “The Thanhouser Twins,” and debuted in the one-reeler logically titled The Twins (1912). Between commutes they still chased Broadway spotlights, and by 1917 they were high-kicking with Ziegfeld, staying with the Follies long enough to become fixtures of its satin-and-feather skyline. 1921 found them back in Manhattan, tapping through Two Little Girls in Blue at the George M. Cohan Theatre when Cosmopolitan waved a contract for The Beauty Shop (1922). Madeline, hungry for grittier footlights, declared in 1923 she would trade chorus-lines for straight drama; Marion stayed planted in musicals. Solo, Madeline clocked performances in Mercenary Mary, The Grab Bag, and The Ritz Revue, but the magnetic pull of sisterhood won out: 1924 reunited them in George White’s Scandals. A decade later she met Leonard Sherman; they married in 1937, produced one daughter—Kate—and parted amicably in 1947. On January 15, 1989, respiratory failure closed the curtain at age 88, ending a life that had never known a final bow.