Pauline Markham (born Margaret Hall or Hale,[1][2] May 1847 – March 20, 1919)[3] was an Anglo-American dancer and contralto singer active on burlesque and vaudeville stages during the latter decades of the 19th century.

[5] Markham was born in England and began her acting career at an early age playing principal boy parts at the Princess Theatre, Manchester.

[12][13] Eleven days earlier she had opened with Thompson at Wood's Theatre in a burlesque of the Wallace opera Lurline and after a relatively short recuperation she chose to join the cast of the Niblo's December revival of The Black Crook playing what would turn out to be her signature role.

[14] The Black Crook, a musical about an English ne'er do well who discovers his noble birth and decides to reform, was first produced in America at Niblo's Theatre in 1866 with a run in excess of 300 performances.

[15] [16] The Black Crook, which featured actresses in flesh colored silk tights, has been credited with starting in 1866 what James Lauren Ford called “the great era of the leg show.

Burnettsville News, April 24, 1919[17]The three were arrested and later pled guilty to assault with Markham receiving a $150 fine and Thompson and Henderson penalized $200 apiece.

[19] In 1872 Markham appeared at Wood’s Museum with Belle Howitt in burlesque productions of Who Cried for the Rain, Red Riding Hood, The Three Musketeers and others, including several shows she had previously performed in with Thompson’s "British Blondes".

[21][22][23] In May 1874 Markham was reported singing for private circles in New Orleans and by the summer of 1875, back in London at the Haymarket Theatre supporting Charles Wyndham in a play entitled Brighton.

She played in Dancing Dolls, a variety show at the Globe Theatre in August 1876, before returning to America the next year to tour with Adah Richmond's Burlesque Company.

That fall she appeared on the legitimate stage in Boston at Howard's Athenaeum as Fanny Vanderbilt in The Charity Ball and later in a production of Robin Hood.

Markham denied any involvement with the scheme or that she was acquainted with any of the men mentioned in the papers as members of the South Carolina ring, telling her interviewer that they are not the kind of persons she permits herself to associate with.

After her second marriage she eventually slipped into poverty with newspaper accounts of her working as a scrub woman and sometimes taking bit parts under an assumed name.

If these accounts are true her poverty, at least in part, resulted from the broken leg she suffered around 1892 after falling through an open cellar door along a stretch of sidewalk in Louisville, Kentucky.