Modjeska, HELENA

Modjeska, HELENA, Polish actress, was born in Cracow, 12th October 1844, and began to act in a travelling company in 1861. Four years later she made a great name at Cracow, and from 1868 to 1876 was the first actress of Warsaw. Then she settled, with her second husband, near Los Angeles, California, to try farming; but the enterprise not succeeding, she returned to the stage, and won a complete triumph as Adrienne Lecouvreur at San Francisco in 1877, although she acted in English, of which language she had known nothing seven months before. She was acknowledged one of the best of modern emotional actresses, achieving triumphs, both in the United States and in Great Britain, in Juliet, Rosalind, Beatrice, and in the Dame aux Camélias; but ere long returned to farming and bee-keeping in California.