Margaret Illington

Margaret Illington ill-ing-ton (July 23, 1879 – March 11, 1934) was a stage actress popular in the first decade of the 20th century. She later made an attempt at silent film acting by making two films with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players-Lasky franchise. After her film and theater career were over she settled down as the wife of Major Edward Bowes, her second husband whom she married in 1910. There were no children with either husband.

She was born Maude Light in 1879 in Bloomington, Illinois to I.H. Light and his wife, Mary Ellen. The two different years of birth are constantly given from source to source. She was educated at Illinois Wesleyan University and then for two years was a pupil at Conway's Dramatic School in Chicago.

She made her Broadway debut in 1900 and a few years later she married Broadway impresario Daniel Frohman in 1903 making her a sister-in-law of powerful theater owner Charles Frohman. Daniel was nearly thirty years her senior. The marriage didn't last the decade and ended in 1909 but her association with Frohman was a tremendous boost to her career and without him she wouldn't have gotten the plum roles she got or ascended to the top of the Broadway heap as fast. An early Broadway success was The Two Orphans, 1904, co-starring Grace George. She and George played the sisters later played famously by Lillian and Dorothy Gish in D. W. Griffith's 1922 film Orphans of the Storm.

Margaret Illington
The Theatre Magazine, 1906

Illington married Edward Bowes in 1910 and desired to have a baby according to newspaper accounts that interviewed her. But it was not to be and she continued in plays. One of her best known plays at this time was Kindling later turned into a 1916 silent film by Cecil B. DeMille, but minus Illington. In 1917 Illington decided to try her hand at moviemaking and signed with Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky. She starred in The Inner Shrine and Sacrifice, both directed by stage actor Frank Reicher. Zukor famously visited her on the set during the making of The Inner Shrine. When her two films were completed she returned to the stage and remained for about two years before retiring in 1919.

In 1906 she was painted by the Swiss-born American society painter Adolfo Müller-Ury, a three-quarter seated portrait wearing a gown from the play "Mrs Leffingwall's Boots", which was exhibited at the gallery of M. Knoedler & Co., Fifth Avenue that December. Müller-Ury sent the picture to the Paris Salon in 1907 (No. 1191), and exhibited it three times more in 1908 in New York, Washington and Philadelphia. It was reproduced in The Metropolitan Magazine, Vol. XXV, No. 1, 5 October 1906. She died in Miami, Florida in 1934.