Sylvia Gerrish (born Lillian M. Rollins; May 1860 – December 8, 1906) was an American musical theatre performer who found success in New York and London in the 1880s and early 1890s.

[1] Gerrish began her career in San Francisco theatres in 1880 and commenced a long tour with Willie Edouin’s company the following year in a piece called Dreams.

[4][5][6] At Christmas 1880, she appeared in Francis Burnand's musical burlesque Ixion, or the Man at the Wheel staged at the Standard Theatre on Bush Street, San Francisco.

[15] She spent the next nine years on the New York stage playing such roles as Fleta in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Iolanthe in 1883 at the Standard Theatre, Cousin Hebe in a revival of H.M.S.

[16] Gerrish made her London debut on August 3, 1893, at the Trafalgar Square Theatre playing the title role in Mam'zelle Nitouche by the French composer Hervé.

[18][19] That December she appeared in a B. F. Keith vaudeville show at the Bijou Theatre in Philadelphia with Marshall P. Wilder and other New York stage stars of the day.

[20] Gerrish was not considered by some critics to be a great singer or actress, but she had stage presence, enhanced by an attractive figure (her legs were particularly admired), that by her early thirties was becoming harder to maintain.

[24][25] Gerrish spent the last months of her life deep in debt, in a mansion badly in need of repair, surrounded by servants and guard dogs to shield her from the daily horde of creditors and process servers gathered at her gates.