Louise Gunning

Louise Gunning , was an American soprano singer popular on Broadway in Edwardian musical comedy and comic opera from the late 1890s to the eve of the First World War. She was perhaps best remembered as Princess Stephanie of Balaria in the 1911 Broadway production of The Balkan Princess. During the war years Gunning began to close out her career singing on the vaudeville circuit.

Gunning was born in Boston, Massachusetts and later lived in Brooklyn, New York where her father was a Baptist minister. Her mother, Mary Gunning, was a choir director who, besides her daughter, also trained the silent film actress Lucille Lee Stewart. Gunning made her first stage appearances as a chorus singer in a Frank Daniels show and later as a solo act singing Scottish ballads. In 1897 she appeared in a New York production of The Circus Girl, followed in rapid succession by performances in the Charles H. Hoyt farce comedies A Stranger in New York, A Milk White Flag and A Day and a Night. In the fall of 1899 she sang in the Rogers Brothers hit farce musical, The Roger Brothers in Wall Street at the old Victoria Theatre, New York.

Source: Wikipedia