Jennie Lee (British actress)

Jennie Lee (c. 1854[1][2] – 3 May 1930) was a Victorian Era English stage actress, singer and dancer whose career was largely entwined with the title role in Jo, a melodrama[3] her husband, John Pringle Burnett,[4] wove around a relatively minor character from the Charles Dickens novel, Bleak House.

Reduced circumstances over her final years forced Lee to seek assistance from an actor's pension fund subsidised in part by proceeds from Royal Command Performances.

[2] In the fall of 1869, some eighteen months after her father's death, Lee made her stage debut at London's Lyceum Theatre as one of the twelve pages in Chilpéric, an opéra bouffe with libretto and music by Hervé.

At the same venue later in 1870, Lee was a crossing sweeper in Hervé's operetta, Le petit Faust, and in July 1870 at the Royal Strand Theatre she played Prince Ahmed in Henry James Byron's romance, The Pilgrim of Love.

[8][9] Lee remained at the Strand Theatre through the season of 1870–71 and afterwards accepted an offer from E. A. Sothern to play Mary Meredith that fall at New York's Niblo's Garden in a revival of Our American Cousin.

[21] On 12 June 1873, the Union Square Theatre held a benefit performance on Lee's behalf with a production of Thomas William Robertson's Caste, with the British-born actor James Henry Stoddart in the role of Eccles.

[34] Early in January 1874, Lee played Jelly, the chambermaid in an English farce entitled Beautiful Forever,[35] and appeared in the H. J. Byron burlesque extravaganza Eily O'Conner, based on Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn.

[39] By 31 March, Lee and Burnett had apparently parted from Galton's troupe and were now appearing together at San Francisco's California Theatre in Thomas Haynes Bayly's one-act farce The Maid of Munster.

[40][41] On 23 May at San Francisco's Maguire's New Theatre Lee was the heroine Gilberte in Augustin Daly's adaptation of the Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac five-act comedy, Frou-Frou.

In June and July, she played Mary Meredith to Edward Sothern's Lord Dundreary in Our American Cousin;[44] in July, Polly Eccles, in Thomas Robertson's comedy Home;[45] in August, Zamora to Bella Pateman's Juliana, in John Tobin's comedy, The Honeymoon;[46][47] in October, Bob, the boot-black, to Frank Mayo's Badger, in Dion Boucicault's The Streets of New York;[48][49] in November, Susan to William Florence's Captain Cuttle, in John Brougham's adaptation of Dickens's Dombey and Son;[50] in December, Bridget Maguire to Florence's Bryan O'Farrell, in Edmund Falconer's Eileen Oge;[51] in January 1875, reprised Polly Eccles for her benefit performance of Robertson's Home;[52] and in February, Mrs. Wobbler in Henry J. Byron's drama Blow for Blow.

[53] On 7 June 1875, Lee played for the first time Jo, the crossing-sweeper, in H. A. Rendle's stage adaptation of Dickens's Bleak House entitled Chesney Wold, with Fanny Janauschek in the dual roles of Lady Dedlock and Hortense.

[57] On 4 August 1875, Lee was given a farewell benefit at the California Theatre not long before she and Burnett departed San Francisco by train to begin the first leg of their return trip back to England.

Performing Jo, The Grasshopper, adapted by Burnett from La Cigale by Halévy and Meilhac,[82] and other productions, Lee went on to play at venues at Hobart, Dunedin, Christchurch, Invercargill, Wellington and Auckland.

[87][88] Sometime after the loss of her family Lee fell into financial difficulties and spent her final years receiving support from the newly established King George's Pension Fund for Actors.

On 7 February 1921, Lee briefly emerged from retirement to perform a scene from Jo at a fund raising event at the Lyric Theatre, London, that benefited the Charles Dickens Memorial House.