Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on December 25, 1865, Fay Templeton was the daughter of theatrical parents╤principals in the touring John Templeton Opera Company╤and grew up entirely in that milieu. She was carried on stage in infancy and had her first speaking part at five. While a child she appeared in several plays, including Augustin Daly╒s productions of A Midsummer Night╒s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. She also evinced a flair for mimicry.
By the early 1880s Templeton was touring the country with her own light opera company. Her ascent to fame began with her appearance in Evangeline at the Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York City in October 1885. She made her London debut in Monte Cristo, Junior at the Gaiety Theatre in December 1886. In a succession of extravaganzas over the next decade she became celebrated equally for her singing, her acting, and her dark seductive beauty. In 1898 she appeared with the team of Joe Weber and Lew Fields in their burlesque Hurly Burly, in which her talents for comedy and parody found their home. She starred in Weber and Fields╒s Fiddle-dee-dee in 1900, Hoity Toity in 1901, and Twirly Whirly in 1902, all of which also featured Lillian Russell. In 1903 she appeared in The Run-aways, a musical, and in 1906 she starred in George M. Cohan╒s Forty-five Minutes from Broadway, in which she introduced ╥Mary╒s a Grand Old Name╙ and ╥So Long, Mary.╙
For a quarter-century thereafter she lived in semiretirement with her husband in Pittsburgh. She emerged to appear in such productions as Weber and Fields╒s Hokey Pokey in 1912 and several versions of H.M.S. Pinafore, in which, with her increasing tendency to corpulence, she made the role of Buttercup virtually her own. She appeared in a film, Broadway to Hollywood, in 1933, and late in that year returned to Broadway in Jerome Kern╒s Roberta, with which she then toured in 1934╨1935. She retired to the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1936 and moved the next year to San Francisco, where she died on October 3, 1939.
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