A few years ago, I came across the name of an American singer and actress online, while researching my own theatrical family. I was intrigued by her and her apparent disappearance during the Edwardian era: from having frequent mentions in the press, suddenly there was nothing. There was no sign of her; not just no evidence of her still singing or acting, but no sign of her full stop. I could not find out where or when she had died – she simply vanished.

I began to look at undertaking a book about her, and even received a grant from the Society for Theatrical Research to research her further. But I could not get past the one stumbling block of how she finished her life – and without this, I doubted whether I could finish writing the book: for how could I finish the biography without knowing how the subject of it ended her life?

I thought about trying to contact descendants of her siblings – perhaps by putting a call out to local radio stations in the area where she and her family lived, or places I knew she had had nieces and nephews. Then I got a message via Facebook from one of her descendants, who had read about my research online. Sadly, they were asking me if I knew when and where she had died, as nobody in her family knew. It seemed I was at a complete dead end.

Yet this was a woman who, for a while, was famous on both sides of the Atlantic – or rather, infamous. Ilda Orme was known as something of a character, a woman with a knack for reinvention, whose life seemed to be rather eventful. She had started out life as a farmer’s daughter in Illinois, born as Ida Jones around 1857. The second youngest of eleven children, she and her sisters had been artistic and keen to sing on the local stage from a young age, but only Ida decided to make it a career. She trained in Boston, and then moved to New York to start acting professionally.

She changed her name several times before settling on the professional name of Ilda Orme. Sometimes, she was described as Welsh (although she was born a Jones, her family had long been settled in America), and sometimes as French, something she was keen to encourage. She was friends with the New York mesmerist Washington Irving Bishop, and on his premature death in 1889, ensured she was mentioned in press tributes (although it’s not clear how close she really was to him). She wrote her own songs, but became angry when others performed them, especially when they received press plaudits for how well they did. She performed across America, but then moved to London to act there.

It was in London that the first two controversies came. Firstly, in June 1897, Ilda sued her dentist for damages following cosmetic work on her teeth. She lost the case, but appeared obsessed with the dentist. Then, on the night of 18 September 1897, she was walking home to her lodgings in Bloomsbury after a performance. As she reached her doorstep, at 22 Keppel Street, she said she became aware of someone following her, and turned. She was shot in the chest. To the police, she told a rather unbelievable story – that she had been shot by a member of the elite, Sir Greville Temple, who had been commissioned to kill her by a wealthy Boston family. She claimed she had been engaged to a son of the family, but his father did not think she was good enough and so had wrecked the relationship. Even after the relationship had ended, he was not happy, and so had tried – she argued – to have her assassinated.

The police did not believe her, and it also turned out that ‘Sir Greville Temple’ – whether or not he had been tailing Ilda – was actually an impostor named William Woodman Runcieman, who in August 1898 was sentenced to five years in prison for impersonating the baronet. Meanwhile, once Ilda had recovered from the gunshot wound, she was declared insane by a magistrate and ordered to be admitted to the Colney Hatch asylum. After a few months there, she was transferred to the Fisherton asylum in Wiltshire, and stayed there six months. It was only when her younger sister wrote to the American ambassador demanding his intervention that Ilda was released – on condition that she return to America immediately. She didn’t, instead trying to resurrect her career in Britain before eventually returning.

Press coverage of this assassination attempt duly moved from sympathetic articles to ones almost mocking Ilda. She was angry at this, and placed adverts in the press to make clear that she was perfectly sane and keen to take on theatrical engagements. A concert was arranged in London in June 1898 where Ilda would sing some of her own songs – this was a charity event aimed at rehabilitating her career. However, what was once seen as a promising career was now stymied by Ilda’s reputation. This was further spoilt by another incident in June 1899, when Ilda boarded a ship docked in New York – due to sail for Britain imminently – and started horse-whipping a famous American theatrical manager, Marcus Mayer. She seems to have seen Mayer as part of the Boston conspiracy, charged by the father with trying to stop people from hiring her. Mayer refused to press charges, but the story was widely covered in the press, complete with illustrations of Ilda armed with her horse-whip.

From this point on, Ilda’s career declined, despite her best efforts to promote herself in the press. She would frequently stress that she was doing well, and advertise her forthcoming engagements, but these were now in smaller venues in more minor cities. Although she went to Paris for a spell, she was more often found in places such as Alaska and Scotland, working the provincial circuit or undertaking one-off shows in gold-mining towns. She was seen now as something of a joke; in 1903, one Butte, Montana newspaper described her as peddling stories of ‘woe and misery’ to the press, ‘and between acts sang wretchedly bad at a Broadway beer and concert hall – so bad indeed that her engagement had to be shortened by the managers’. This was when she was described elsewhere as ‘earning a living by pandering to the tastes of the vulgar throng in a local beer hall of ill-notoriety’, a result, she said, of her enemies ‘exiling’ her.

Yet she still had ambition, turning up in Paris alone, not knowing any French, and making her way to venues to persuade managers to give her a chance. They proved willing to do so, and she arguably was more of a success there for a time than at home. In Los Angeles, one headline described the ‘actress’s queer career of hard luck’, noting that she was unable to get any decent gigs in California. American newspapers eagerly detailed her chequered past, trying to reconcile the tales of madness and paranoia, of violence and scandal, with her evident cleverness and talent. Then, after a report of her performing burlesque at Flynn’s Gaiety Guild in 1906, mentions of her stopped.

I know what happened to Ilda’s many siblings – including one, ‘Buffalo’ Jones, who became a famous conservationist. I also strongly suspect that Ilda’s tale of a Boston scion who took a vehement dislike to her was actually, at least in part, true, despite the press believing it was something she had imagined, a symptom of a diseased brain. For my research suggests that Ilda had indeed been engaged to Walter Dyer, the son of a wealthy Boston man named Micah Dyer, while she was studying there, and that the marriage had not taken place (Walter, a widower, would soon go on to marry a more appropriate ‘society lady’). This man was later accused of a vendetta against a neighbour, so perhaps it was not unfeasible that he had also taken a dislike to the young performer who might not have been an appropriately respectable prospect as a daughter-in-law. In addition, in 1887, Ilda had sued Walter Dyer for breach of promise and seduction, demanding $50,000 – something that would not have endeared his father towards her.

From this situation, Ilda may well have become paranoid, feeling that her lack of stardom was a result not of bad luck, lack of talent, or theatrical managers’ suspicions about her instability, but because of one man’s feelings about her. The failure of this relationship – which would have given her wealth and status – seems to have festered in her mind, giving her someone else to blame for her problems. The shooting incident – where the police found that she had intentionally shot herself, aiming to blame an assassin – was both the sign of a deeply disturbed woman, and also the sign of a woman who knew the value of publicity; she perhaps thought that this tale would make her famous, give her positive publicity in the press, and potentially bring down the Boston man who she saw as her nemesis. Likewise, the attack on Marcus Meyer was Ilda trying to punish a man she saw as colluding with that nemesis.

It also has to be remembered, though, that the acting life could be hard – especially for Victorian and Edwardian women. They had to promote themselves while also conforming to certain gendered expectations of behaviour. They had to stand up for themselves, compete with numerous others, and sometimes the pressure was too much for them, as it seems to have been for Ilda. I may not know, still, what happened to Ilda, and be able to finish the biography I’d planned about her, but I’ve certainly learned a lot about her life and the pressures she faced along the way. {