Mace Greenleaf (December 8, 1872 – March 23, 1912) was an American stage and silent film actor.

Early life

Mace Greenleaf was born at

Dixfield, Maine Dixfield is a New England town, town in Oxford County, Maine, Oxford County, Maine, United States. Dixfield is included in the Lewiston-Auburn, Maine metropolitan New England city and town area. The population was 2,253 at the 2020 United State ...

, the only child of Charles Ward Greenleaf and Mary Stanley (née Eustis) Greenleaf. Charles Greenleaf was a native of

Massachusetts Massachusetts ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...

and supported his family employed as a

surveyor Surveying or land surveying is the technique, profession, art, and science of determining the terrestrial two-dimensional or three-dimensional positions of points and the distances and angles between them. These points are usually on the ...

.1900 US Census Records

Career

Greenleaf's first important role came in the late 1890s playing Herbert, the king's forester, in stock productions of ''

The Prisoner of Zenda ''The Prisoner of Zenda'' is an 1894 adventure novel by Anthony Hope, in which the King of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation and thus is unable to attend the ceremony. Political forces within the realm are such that, in o ...

'' and its companion piece ''

Rupert of Hentzau ''Rupert of Hentzau'' is a sequel by Anthony Hope to '' The Prisoner of Zenda'', written in 1895 but not published in book form until 1898. The novel was serialized in ''The Pall Mall Magazine'' and '' McClure's Magazine'' from December 1897 ...

''. In 1898, he played Mr. Hunston in Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's play ''

Trelawny of the 'Wells' Trelawny or Trelawney may refer to: Places * Trelawny (electoral division), an electoral division of Cornwall * Trelawny, Black Hill, Ballarat, a heritage house in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia * Trelawny, Jamaica, a parish of Cornwall County, Ja ...

'' that opened at the Lyceum Theatre in New York on November 22, 1898. His next Broadway performance was in '' The Pride of Jennico'' with James K. Hackett and Bertha Galland staged at the Criterion Theatre in 1900. Later that year, he played the role of Myrtle May's lover in a road production of ''The Parish Priest'' with Daniel Sully. During the first decade of the 20th century, Mace Greenleaf played leading roles in stock companies on both coasts and middle America. He returned to Broadway in 1905 to play the

prince of Wales Prince of Wales (, ; ) is a title traditionally given to the male heir apparent to the History of the English monarchy, English, and later, the British throne. The title originated with the Welsh rulers of Kingdom of Gwynedd, Gwynedd who, from ...

in the romantic musical ''Edmund Burke''. In 1911, he joined the fledgling motion picture industry where he would appear in at least 18 films in the final year of his life.

Marriage

In September 1906, Greenleaf married Lucy (aka Lucie) Banning in

Santa Ana, California Santa Ana (Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a city in and the county seat of Orange County, California, United States. Located in the Greater Los Angeles region of Southern California, the city's population was 310,227 at the 2020 census. As ...

. Banning came from a very wealthy family that owned Catalina Island, and was remembered at the time for an affair she had while married to her first husband that ended with the suicide of her lover. Lucy Banning was known as something of a free spirit and often scandalized "polite society" with the number of men in her life. She left Greenleaf in 1910 for the son of a prominent judge.

Death

Mace Greenleaf died on March 23, 1912, while in Philadelphia after a brief battle with

pneumonia Pneumonia is an Inflammation, inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as Pulmonary alveolus, alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of Cough#Classification, productive or dry cough, ches ...

Sources

{{DEFAULTSORT:Greenleaf, Mace 1872 births 1912 deaths 19th-century American male actors American male stage actors American male silent film actors 20th-century American male actors People from Dixfield, Maine Male actors from Maine Deaths from pneumonia in Pennsylvania