MISS NANCE O'NEIL.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1277, 4 November 1911, Page 11

MISS NANCE O'NEIL.

Mrs. William Desmond (wifo of tho Silver King!) after her long tour of Australia, brings back with her to Sydney good news of her only sister, Miss Nance O'Neil, an American tragedienne, justly admired in this country. About Christmas, 1909, this actress mado an immense success at the fashionable Stuyvesant Theatre, New York, in the French societydrama, "Tho Lily," with Charles Cartwright in the cast, and after a long run, lasting until her usual holiday at Cairo and Pa.ris, tho star resumed tho role on tour in tho United States, closing with another vacation a few months ago in the Yosemito Valley (California). Mrs. Desmond now forwards cuttings from the San Francisco papers, showing that Miss O'Neil recommenced a new years work thcro at the end of August by producing Sardon's tragic drama, "The Sorceress, originally written for Sarah Bernhardt. It scorns that the great French actress had quite recently played the role of the Moorish woman, Zoraya, in the Californian capital, and in it "proved her ago by many a pathetic expedient sinco it mado physical demands she could not answer, and called for allurements which she no longer possesses." This extract is from a very finely-written article in tho "Chronicle," in which tho critic, whilst asserting tho superior art of Bernhardt, maintains that most people would sooner see O'Neil in it, and he remarks that "if one has imagination, it is fatally easy to succumb to Nance O'Neil s spell. Her quick, sinuous, yet tempered movements, her deep and mournful voice, her rhythmic, yet unexpected intonations, her unsmiling "intentness, and tho tragic vitality with which she infuses every role, exercise an appeal that develops almost into a hypnotic command." Miss O'Neil, who has been drawing crowded houses in her native city, his been lauded to tho skies by the Californian press, and as Sydney playgoers know, with ample reason; but the English essay-style of the above-quoted criticism carries more weight with it than all the others put together.