ACTRESS' TRAGEDY.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 77, 31 March 1928, Page 3 (Supplement)

ACTRESS' TRAGEDY.

DRUGS AFTER BROKEN ENGAGEMENT. Three years ago Julia Bruns, once one of the leading actresses in America and chosen in the heyday of her career as the most beautiful girl in the United States, paid a visit to Paris to buy new dresses. It was a brief holiday after strenuous work in playing the lead in the famous play, "Potash and Perlmutter." Weeks went by and she did not return to fulfil her engagements at the Broadway theatres. Eventually she was found, a shadow of her former self, a confirmed drink and drug maniac, in r. poor quarter of the French capital. Friends took her back to New York, where it was revealed that while in Paris she received a cablegram telling of the sudden marriage of the man to whom she was engaged. Broken in health and spirit, she took to drugs as a solace and then found she could not cure herself.

Two years ago Julia Brune, her savings dissipated, her good looks gone, forsook the stage and disappeared. Now, it has been revealed, she died on Christmas Kve in a squalid tenement almost witliin the shadows of the great theatres she once adorned. Her death was due to an overdose of drugs. And of all the men of wealth and position who coveted her attentions a few brief years ago, not one came forward to pay the trivial burial expenses.

Charles H. Brile, a labourer, with whom she lived as his wife for a year before her death, hadn't the money. Sorrowfully he admitted it to police and to attendants at Bellevue Mortuary, New York, where before the inquest he took a single white lily and pressed it in the dead girl's hands. He just met her, he explained, and knew nothing of her past.

It was her mother, a modestly-circum-stanced widow, Mrs. Catherine Bruns, of St. Louis, who paid the undertaker. Julia hadn't written to her mother for months. She told friends she couldn't bear to hurt her while she was down-and-out—the victim of the nar ;oties she sought so hard to shake off.

In death, Julia Bruns —who once occupied a mansion in New York—had only a few soiled rags and a thick sorapbook containing the record of her triumphs in capitals of the world. Shortly after leaving school at St. Louis a dozen years ago, Julia was found by Artist Flagg while in the chorus of Soutfa's operetta, "American Maid." Her face —a haunting, voluptuous brunette —graced numerous magazine covers. She. played leading woman to Arnold Daly, who was burned to death a year ago, for three years, and she had the lead in such successes as "Help Wanted, "Business Before Pleasure," "Beware the Dogs" and "Potash and Perlmutter." She paid visits to London and Berlin, and won admiration for her talent and beauty.