Laura Joyce Bell

Laura Joyce Bell (6 May 1854 – 30 May 1904) was an English-American actress and contralto singer mostly associated with Edwardian musical comedy and light opera. She was the wife of the American comedian Digby Bell with whom she frequently appeared with over the last two decades of her career.

Bell was born in London, the daughter of Maria Dauncey, a well-known dramatic elocutionist and voice teacher, and James Henry Maskell, a London theatrical agent. She attended the Royal Academy of Music, a student of Francesco Schira, and made her London debut in a comic opera entitled Mina. She later appeared at the Royal Strand Theatre as Gertrude in a production of James Planché's Loan of a Lover. During this early period Bell played the Count of Flanders in a piece entitled Cupid 'Mid the Roses, possibly inspired by the ballad from Joseph Knight, and The Ring and the Keeper, from John Pratt Wooler. She later participated in a British tour that showcased her talents in a two-hour presentation called Happy Hours, that was followed by a season at the Theatre Royal, Manchester and an engagement with Dion Boucicault as a soubrette singer at Covent Gardens.

Bell made her first notable appearance in New York in the spring of 1872 at Niblo's Garden performing in the "spectacle pantomime" Azeal, possibly based on the earlier musical by Daniel Auber, and afterward made a hit in the title role of the Edward E. Rice and J. Cheever Goodwin extravaganza, Evangeline, first played at the old Boston Globe Theatre on 7 June 1875 and reprised the following season at the Boston Museum. Bell played Buttercup in H. M. S. Pinafore in May 1879 with the Grand English Opera Company at Haverly's Lyceum Theatre and the next year joined the company of actors and singers at Daly's Broadway Theatre in productions of the Edgar Fawcett musical comedy Our First Families, the musical comedy, Zanina, taken from Nisida by Richard Genée, Cinderella at School, a long running musical comedy by Woolson Morse from the Thomas William Robertson musical School, that in turn was adapted from the German Aschenbrödel, by Johann Strauss II; and productions of Fawcett's comedy Americans Abroad.

She next signed with the Bijou Opera House and, beginning in June 1882, Bell played Lady Jane in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience, which featured Digby Bell as Archibald Grosvenor. In October she appeared with Bell and Lillian Russell in The Sorcerer. In January 1883, she sang at the Bijou in the Solomon and Stephens opera, Virginia.

In May 1883 Bell was with the McCaull Comic Opera Company at the Casino Theatre performing in an English adaptation of Offenbach's, La princesse de Trébizonde, and that November with Rice's Opera Bouffe Company appeared at the Bijou in Orpheus and Eurydice, Max Freeman's adaptation of Offenbach's Orphée aux enfers. From October 1884 Bell was engaged at the Casino in a revival of The Beggar Student, by Carl Millöcker. The following March at the Casino, Bell was Ruth to her husband's Sergeant of Police in The Pirates of Penzance, and to positive reviews in the spring of 1886 Bell and her husband toured with McCaull's company in an English-language version of Millöcker's comic opera The Black Hussars (Der schwarze Husar). Later in 1886 the two toured with the same company in Don Caesar, possibly from Boucicault's play Don Caesar de Bazan; or, Love and Honor, and The Crowing Hen, from Edmond Audran's Le Serment d'Amour.

In 1886 Bell played Lady Prue and her husband, Matt o' the Mill, in McCaull's presentation at the Star Theatre of Audran's Indiana and Tronda in a successful English adaptation of Von Suppé's The Bellman. She was Katisha opposite her husband's Ko-Ko in an April 1890 Broadway Theatre revival of The Mikado, and in April 1897 played the strong-willed mother-in law of Dr. Willow (Digby Bell) in Thomas's play The Hoosier Doctor.

On 1 January 1874, Bell married James Valentine Taylor (1843–1882), a Boston area architect and later theatre manager who had recently come into a family fortune. The two had met when Taylor was the manager at Niblo's Theatre and had married over the objections of her father. A son was born that 7 November and by the summer of 1877 Bell would file for divorce with allegations of physical abuse and habitual drunkenness against her husband. Aside from support and custody issues, the divorce was granted in June 1878 after generating numerous headlines in the press.

Bell's son, Valentine Taylor (7 November 1874 – 3 May 1943), was a Harvard-educated lawyer who served as an assistant New York Attorney General, law secretary to several New York appellate judges and as council to New York governors, William Sulzer and Martin H. Glynn.

She married Digby Valentine Bell over the second weekend of March 1883, a day or two after he'd received an absolute divorce from Lillian Brooks. Since Brooks had accused the couple of infidelity, a charge that was denied by both and never proven, the divorce decree forbade the two from marrying in New York. They wed in Pennsylvania instead and used a similar case involving a divorced New York judge as precedence for their marriage to be recognised in New York State.

Bell died in May 1904 at their residence on Lexington Avenue, New York City, and is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York. The year before she was with her husband and De Wolf Hopper in the long run of Mr. Pickwick (from the Charles Dickens novel, The Pickwick Papers) at the Herald Square Theatre and later the Grand Opera House. Digby Bell and her mother, Maria Maskell, both died in 1917.