Selina Dolaro

Selina Simmons Belasco Dolaro (20 August 1849 – 23 January 1889)[1] was an English singer, actress, theatre manager and writer of the late Victorian era.

In 1865, at the age of sixteen, she married Isaac Dolaro Belasco, an Italian Jew of Spanish descent, in Upper Kennington, with whom she had four children; they divorced in 1873.

[4] In 1872 Dolaro was a leading performer in H. B. Farnie's English-language adaptation of Offenbach's Geneviève de Brabant,[5] in Hervé's Doctor Faust[6] and in a burlesque of Ferdinand Hérold's Zampa ("Charmingly sung by Miss Dolaro in imitation of Mdlle Chaumont", said The Times)[7] She also appeared in the title role of Bizet's Carmen in the first English-language production, with the Carl Rosa Opera Company, opposite Durward Lely as Don José.

[8] As a replacement afterpiece to La Périchole, her new theatre manager, Richard D'Oyly Carte, commissioned Trial by Jury from W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan.

Dolaro travelled to the United States that autumn, appearing in October at the Academy of Music in New York City in the title role of Carmen, but reviews were mixed, with one critic commenting that she seemed "much more at home" performing in burlesque and comic opera.

There, she worked under Carte's agency while appearing as Girola in Bucalossi's Les Manteaux Noirs and Katrina in Robert Planquette's Rip van Winkle and as the Fairy Queen in Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, all in 1882 at the Standard Theatre.

... Is it not enough that we must slave as we do to earn the means to educate and train our children so as to enable them to become useful members of society without being assailed even from the pulpit with such outrageous slander?”[1] Dolaro's last part was Minnie Marden in an adaptation of Victorien Sardou's Agnes in 1886.