Laura Keene was a British stage actress and theatre manager. In her twenty-year career, she became known as the first powerful female manager in New York. She is most famous for being the lead actress in the play Our American Cousin, which was attended by President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington on the evening of his assassination.
Laura Keene
The blood-stained sleeve cuff belonging to Keene on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
Burial site at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
An actor-manager is a leading actor who sets up their own permanent theatrical company and manages the business, sometimes taking over a theatre to perform select plays in which they usually star. It is a method of theatrical production used consistently since the 16th century, particularly common in 19th-century Britain and the United States.
Actor-manager Henry Irving
Henry Irving in The Bells, 1874