Adah Isaacs Menken

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Adah Isaacs Menken

Adah Isaacs Menken (15 June 1835 - August 10, 1868) was an American actress, painter and poet.

She was born Adah Bertha Theodore in New Orleans to a French Creole mother and Free Negro Auguste Theodore. She danced as a child in New Orleans, Havana and Texas. Eventually she worked in San Francisco. Menken was known for her poetry and painting. In 1859 she appeared on Broadway in the play "The French Spy."

She converted to Judaism and married a Jewish musician, Alexander Isaac Menken. Their marriage was short-lived. Menken separated from, and then later divorced her, though she remained committed to Judaism her entire life. She had four marriages in the space of seven years. She was Mrs. John C. Heenan (and accused of bigamy because Menken had not secured a divorce).

She played "Mister Bones," a minstrel character, and impersonated Edwin Booth as Hamlet and Richelieu. She performed with Blondin, a Niagara Falls tightrope walker. Her provocative stage performance, strapped to a horse bareback, wearing only tights in Mazeppa helped establish her reputation as a scandalous figure. On August 24, 1863, the master of San Francisco theater, Tom McGuire presented Mazeppa with Miss Menken. She later became Mrs. Robert Henry Newel. Even later she became Mrs. James Barkley. The probable facts of her life were not established until 1938.

She went to perform in Paris, France and was romanced by Alexandre Dumas, père. She went to London, England, and was wooed by Charles Reade, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Tom Hood and became a friend to Charles Dickens.

Later, in ill health, she wrote to a friend, "I am lost to art and life. Yet, when all is said and done, have I not at my age tasted more of life than most women who live to be a hundred? It is fair, then, that I should go where old people go." She died at the age of thirty-three in Paris, France in 1868 and is interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

Much of the information pertaining to Menken's racial and religious background has been questioned in more recent historical biography, particularly in Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity, Cambridge University Press, 2003.