Clara Morris (1849–1925)

Clara Morris, born Clara La Montagne in Toronto, Canada, was the daughter of a bigamous marriage. The family situation was exposed when she was three years old, and her mother fled with her to Cleveland, Ohio and adopted her grandmother's surname of Morrison. In about 1860, Clara joined the ballet company of the Cleveland Academy of Music, where she received nine years of training and shortened her surname to Morris. She then became an actress and made her Broadway stage debut in 1870 in Wilkie Collins’s play Man and Wife. She had great success in highly emotional, dramatic roles such as Camille and Jane Eyre. She toured the USA extensively in the 1880s. She retired from the stage in the 1890s and became a successful freelance writer for various magazines. She also wrote a daily newspaper column for 10 years, several screenplays, and numerous volumes of memoirs. In her autobiography Life on the Stage: My Personal Experiences and Recollections (1901), she described her meeting with John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Lincoln. In 1874, she married Frederick C. Harriott, and was also known as Clara Morris Harriott.