KATE VAUGHAN.

Otago Witness, Issue 2565, 13 May 1903, Page 66

KATE VAUGHAN.

YESTERDAY AND TODAY. It is something of a shock to us playgoers of the eighties to find, comparatively speaking, so little notice taken of the death ol "Kate Vaughan. There have been numberless paragraphs about it, it is true ; but I can remember a time when her disappearance would have produced a big shock, and apparently a void that could never again be filled, and when columns would have been deemed insufficient to have told the •story of her life and her charms. MIDDLE-AOED MEMORIES. I suppose it is the prejudice of middleage, but 1 have never seen a dancer who even approached Kate Vaughan for grace and for charm. It was not only hei greatest, I am not sure that it was not also her only big gift as an actress. In ill thatlong succession of pieces in which she figured at the Gaiety under the historio regime of John Hollingshead, she had plenty of other things to do besides dance ; she had to talk n. good deal, and she had to sing a good deal. But I never thought, her dialogue interesting, and she hadn't a particle even of a singing voice. Her voice, as I remember it. was almost hoarse; certainly it was unmusical. Or.ACK PERSONIFIED And yet, speaking indifferently, singing badly, this delightful creature wiis ;ible to draw huge audiences night after night for years to the Gaiety Theatre, and iiu one ever saw her without wanting to see her again and yet again. It \n.- all )kt dancing, though, perhaps:, I should add. it was also her winning presence and her stage beauty. The moment she began to dance you forgot the perfunctory voice dialogue, the somewhat raucous and untuneful singing, and you were swept away by a sense of exquisite motion, of living and moving poetry. It was not that there was Anything very fantastic or very original in her steps — she did not go in for highly elaborati dancing, nor was it that *U? performed those dreadful athletic i<;.i.>- of standing on tip-toe aid care-?.-ing across the si.a«t — a iorxn of dancing which has

always been unintelligible and unattractive to my poor judgment ; it was that every motion of hers was graceful — tliat, in short, she was one of those .women who were grace personified. ON AND OFF THE STAGE. T have spoken of her stage beauty, and I used the adjective deliberately, because off the stage Kate Vaughan was not by any means as beautiful as she was when she was on it. She required the gauzy silks and the camel-laair brush and the rouge pot to make her the wonderfully attractive being she appeared when she was before the footlights. Her complexion was naturally pallid ; she was very thin ; and, curiously enough, her manner was quiet and even subdued, and she always suggested great delicacy — ths delicacy of a woman who might any day die of consumption. But, in spite of all, you were always impressed by that indescribable grace; what Nature gave to other women in beauty of figui - e she more than :ompensated for by her case and charm of movement. ITALIAN* AXD HEBREW. Perhaps this instinctive grace was portTy due to the fact that she was Italian through her mother, and she was of Jewish race: that wonderful race which has given so much of its genius to the stage in all its forms. The face was long, thin, wellshaped ; its chief beauty was the eyes. I heard one of her many and enthusiastic admirers describe them as wells of liquid fire. They were certainly very striking, very large, very brilliant, very dark ; thej r gave some indication of the soul ; and, in . fact, were apparently the only outward manifestation that she was a woman who felt deeply, and had run the whole gamut of human passion and experience. For she was gentle and restrained in manner; spoke in very soft tones. You found it, indeed, hard to realise that this soft-spoken, selfrestrained, rather subdued lady was one who had roused some of the most tempestuous passions of her time. A SAD EXIT. If she had lived in France men would have faced each other with the rapier and the pistol for her ; but even in our more prosaic England she had been the central figure in the romance, perhaps also in the unconscious blighting, of more than one life and career. One gentleman, it is known, of high birth and great promise, after beginning a career of great prizes, abandoned them all for those fine dark eyes of hers. At the same moment there was at least one other man ready to make sacrifices as great, to give up all the world for her. The passion ended in marriage, which for some years ran a prosaic course, and then ended in the divorce court. And for poor Kate Vaughan the final ending has been as sad as even the most severe of Psalmists could have wanted. She has died in far-off Johannesburg, poor and almost forgotten, and in the final grip of that fell disease which haunted and pursued her all her life, and was the warning and sorrowful refrain to all the apparent gladsomeness and triumphs of her best years. — I. P. in M.A.P.