Amy Busby (January 19, 1872 – July 13, 1957) was an American actress.

Early life

Amy Busby was born in

Rochester, New York Rochester () is a city in the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, and Yonkers, with a population of 211,328 at the 2020 United States census. Located i ...

, the daughter of Thomas Mark Busby and Eliza Ann Bennett Busby.

Career

Amy Busby went to New York City as a teenager, hoping for a career on the stage. Described as "a vastly pretty woman", she was a protegee of actress

Helen Barry Helen Barry (born Elizabeth Short, 5 January 1840 – 20 July 1904) was an English actress. She began her acting career at age 32 after her first marriage dissolved. She performed leading roles in West End theatres in the 1870s in comedy, dram ...

for a time, and later was engaged by

Stuart Robson Stuart Robson may refer to: * Stuart Robson (actor) * Stuart Robson (speedway rider) See also * Stewart Robson Stewart Ian Robson (born 6 November 1964) is an English former football player and TV and radio football pundit. He played for A ...

and

William H. Crane William Henry Crane (April 30, 1845March 7, 1928) was an American actor. Early years Crane was born in Leicester, Massachusetts on April 30, 1845. He grew up in Boston and graduated from Brimmer School. Career He made his first professional ap ...

for their companies. She appeared in ''London Assurance'', ''Victor Durand'', ''The Pembertons'', ''The Henrietta'', ''She Stoops to Conquer'', ''Is Marriage a Failure?'' ''The American Minister'', ''On Probation'', ''Brother John'', ''For Money'', ''The Senator'', and ''Arms and the Man''. Busby's Broadway credits included ''The Fatal Card'' (1894), ''Madame'' (1896), ''The Law of the Land'' (1896), and ''Secret Service'' (1896). Theatrical producer William Berkeley Enos took the professional name "

Busby Berkeley Busby Berkeley (born Berkeley William Enos; November 29, 1895 – March 14, 1976) was an American film director and musical film, musical choreographer. Berkeley devised elaborate musical production numbers that often involved complex geometric p ...

" from Amy Busby, who was his parents' friend. Sam Insull met his wife, actress Gladys Wallis, at an 1897 dinner party hosted by Amy Busby and Eugene H. Lewis. In the late 1880s Between The Acts, cigarettes ran an advertising campaign featuring actors and actresses on coloured lithograph collectors cards. Amy Busby was featured on one in a series issued from 1880 - 1892.

Personal life

Amy Busby was rumoured to be engaged to actor

William Gillette William Hooker Gillette (July 24, 1853 – April 29, 1937) was an American actor-manager, playwright, and stage-manager in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best remembered for portraying Sherlock Holmes on stage and in a 1916 ...

, but they did not wed. She married several times. In 1892 she married English actor

Aubrey Boucicault Aubrey Boucicault (23 June 1868 or '6910 July 1913) was a British born stage actor, playwright and matinee idol. He came from a famous family of actors and playwrights, his father being Dion Boucicault. Aubrey Boucicault was born in London to D ...

; they divorced in 1893. Her next marriage was to lawyer Eugene Howard Lewis, in 1897; they had three daughters (Amy, Rosamund, and Eugenia) before his death in 1907. She married again in 1908, to mining engineer Theodore Olynthna Douglas; they had two daughters (Theodora and Ruth) before he died in 1920. She was married a final time in 1923, to a man named John James Roy; they separated by 1938. Late in life, she enjoyed baseball as a fan of the

Brooklyn Dodgers The Brooklyn Dodgers were a Major League Baseball team founded in 1884 as a member of the American Association before joining the National League in 1890. They remained in Brooklyn until 1957, after which the club moved to Los Angeles, Californ ...

."Amy Busby Plays Full Career of Life"
''The Pocono Record'' (July 16, 1957): 15. via

Newspapers.com Ancestry.com LLC is an American genealogy company based in Lehi, Utah. The largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical, historical records, and related genetic genealogy websites. In November 2018, ...

Amy Busby died in 1957, aged 85 years, in

East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania East Stroudsburg is a borough in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is located in the Poconos region of the state. Originally known as "Dansbury", East Stroudsburg was renamed for geographic reasons when the Delaware, Lackawanna, an ...

."Amy Busby Dies; Retired Actress"
''New York Times'' (July 15, 1957): 15.

References

External links

*
Amy Busby
on IBDB.
Photographs of Amy Busby
in the New York Public Library's Digital Collections online. {{DEFAULTSORT:Busby, Amy 1872 births 1957 deaths Actresses from Rochester, New York