Today is the birthday of Madeline Cameron (born Madeline Seitz, 1897). She had a balletic dance act with her sister Dorothy that played vaudeville and Broadway revues from the teens into the 1920s. Their dancing was almost universally praised (they could, after all, do a fox trot on their toes), but their singing was generally panned. Still, together and separately, they worked the big time and Broadway both, starting with Dorothy’s performance in The Passing Show of 1914, through Madeline’s in Follow Thru (1929). Their last Broadway credit together in vaudeville was in a couple of Ziegfeld revues in 1920, until they continued to work big time vaudeville after that. In 1917, Madeline married Broadway star William Gaxton; this might have put a wedge in the act. The Camerons seem to slip out of public view after the twenties, though Gaxton remained a star long after that. Dorothy passed away in 1958; Madeline in 1990.
To find out more about the variety arts past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.
And don’t miss my new book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc
(Travalanche) 