Mrs. Sidney Drew

Biography

Gladys Rankin arrived on 8 October 1870 in the glare of New York City, the daughter of two spotlights: Arthur McKee Rankin and Kitty Blanchard, both already treading the boards. By the time most children were learning to read, she was learning to die on cue—her first star turn came in *The Runaway Wife*. At eighteen she married the dapper comic actor Sidney Drew; together they burgled laughs in *The Burglar* and smuggled charm across the border in *That Girl From Mexico*. In 1891 the stork delivered their son, S. Rankin Drew, and the trio became a traveling party, inventing “dramatic vaudeville” before anyone had a name for it. Broadway finally caught up in 1901, when *Sweet and Twenty* let them flirt with age twenty all over again; posters simply called her “Mrs. Sidney Drew,” a title that stuck like stage makeup. Offstage she pulled a fresh mask from the inkwell, signing scripts “George Cameron.” Her 1908 play *Agnes* opened on Broadway under her own name, proving the woman behind the pseudonym could still pack a house. Cameras beckoned in 1911: *The Red Devils*, a frothy screen caper directed by Sidney, recycled one of their nightclub skits and launched her flickering career. Between rehearsals she rattled off one-reelers—*The Still Voice*, *A Sweet Deception*, *The Line-Up*—each starring Sidney and each whittled from her wit. Then the curtain began to fall: a 1913 cancer diagnosis stole color from her cheeks. On 9 January 1914 she exited at forty-three, laid to rest at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla while winter held its breath. Half a year later Sidney revived the billing, wedding Lucille McVey—another “Mrs. Sidney Drew”—and continuing the act. Their son grew into a lens idol until the Great War snatched him in 1918. Decades down the line, a spark named Drew Barrymore would shine from the same family torch, carrying Gladys’s distant glow into new centuries.