Fay Templeton

American singer and actress
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Share
Share to social media
URL
https://mainten.top/biography/Fay-Templeton
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Quick Facts
Born:
Dec. 25, 1865, Little Rock, Ark., U.S. (born on this day)
Died:
Oct. 3, 1939, San Francisco, Calif. (aged 73)

Fay Templeton (born Dec. 25, 1865, Little Rock, Ark., U.S.—died Oct. 3, 1939, San Francisco, Calif.) was an American singer and actress who enjoyed popularity in a career that extended from light opera to burlesque to musical theatre.

Templeton was the daughter of theatrical parents—principals in the touring John Templeton Opera Company—and grew up entirely in that milieu. She was carried onstage in infancy and had her first speaking part at age five.

By the early 1880s Templeton was touring the country with her own light opera company. Her ascent to fame began with her appearance in Evangeline in New York City in 1885. She made her London debut the following year in Monte Cristo, Junior. In a succession of extravaganzas over the next decade, she became celebrated equally for her singing, her acting, and her dark, seductive beauty. She appeared with the team of Joe Weber and Lew Fields in their burlesque Hurly Burly (1898), in which her talents for comedy and parody were realized. She starred in Weber and Fields’s Fiddle-dee-dee (1900), Hoity Toity (1901), and Twirly Whirly (1902), all of which also featured Lillian Russell. In 1906 Templeton starred in George M. Cohan’s Forty-five Minutes from Broadway, in which she introduced “Mary’s a Grand Old Name” and “So Long, Mary.”

USA 2006 - 78th Annual Academy Awards. Closeup of giant Oscar statue at the entrance of the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, film movie hollywood
Britannica Quiz
Pop Culture Quiz

For a quarter-century thereafter, Templeton lived in semiretirement with her husband in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, emerging to appear in such productions as Weber and Fields’s Hokey Pokey in 1912 and several versions of H.M.S. Pinafore. She appeared in the film Broadway to Hollywood (1933) and late in 1933 returned to Broadway in Jerome Kern’s Roberta.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.