EXTRAORDINARY DEATH OP AN ACTRESS.

Auckland Star, Volume VII, Issue 1905, 27 March 1876, Page 3

EXTRAORDINARY DEATH OP AN ACTRESS.

A New York correspondent of a New Zealand exchange, says : —Miss Charlotte Orampton, once the moat popular of American actresses, died in Louisville a few days ago, of yellow jaundice, in her fiftyninth year. Her life had been crowded with strange adventures.l, and her death was in harmony with her life. She died immediately after playing the Queen in "Hamlet," and Mr McCullougb, who was playing Hamlet with her, thus describes her last appearance—She was dying, nay almost dead at the time. Her limbs were rigid, aud her features do contracted that only the eyes and Jips moved. Her disease niide her face a dark saflVon color; she looked almost as dusky as Othello, and her eyes, dilated and with something fearfully weird in their expression, positively froze one's blood. She had to be led to the entrance, but once on the stage was completely herself, except for that dreadful rigidity which marked her as in many respects already dead. Yet not a line or even a word of the part did she miss. In this, her last appearauce before her beloved footlights, she was as perfect in het lines as when in the prime of her career, only the mobility, the ease, the motion, were lacking, but these were things of the past, and "had their being in the i'uln<±s3 of that vital spark which was fast ebbing away. When the last scene closed and she passed from the stage through the entrance, one of the ballet girls made a movement to assist her down the steps that led to the dressing-rooms. The kindly offer was rejected with a dignified gesture, and with eyes fixed in death, features rigid, and limbs nearly paralysed, the once favorile actress slowly dragged herself from the theatre for ever."