A scene like this certainly never happened. But we really don’t know much about the strange, short friendship—or more?—borne between “America’s Sarah Bernhardt” and the country’s most infamous accused killer. As Monster premieres, meet the woman said to have stolen—and then broken—Lizzie Borden’s heart.
The Meet-Cute
Though theatergoers may have considered her an overnight sensation, Nance O’Neil had been chasing fame for most of her life. Per her New York Times obituary, O’Neil was born Gertrude Lamson in 1874 to a religious father who sternly opposed her career in showbiz. A teenaged O’Neil nonetheless hustled a role at San Francisco’s Alcazar Theatre by crashing a rehearsal and convincing the director to allow her to join the cast. Alcazar manager Arthur McKee Rankin later took the actress under his managerial wing, repeatedly changing her name until landing on “Nance O’Neil.”
Nance O’Neil, published 1897.
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Like many if not most working actresses of the Gilded Age, fame (and money) was always precarious for the undeniably beautiful but questionably talented O’Neil. “Nance had a promising new New York premiere, then went off on a world tour, but she actually bombed in London,” says Dr. Jennifer Jones Cavenaugh, theater professor at the University of Richmond and author of the essay Rebels of Their Sex: Nance O’Neil and Lizzie Borden. Rave reviews from her Boston debut in 1904 no doubt marked a welcome career upswing.
Somewhere in the audience was Lizzie Borden, a passionate playgoer who inevitably enjoyed the privacy dark theaters afforded—giving her the chance to watch rather than being watched. Though she had been acquitted of murder a dozen years earlier, after her trial, Borden was largely ostracized by her ever-disapproving neighbors, who slowly came to realize that the local spinster was almost certainly guilty of a gruesome double murder.
Borden was captivated by O’Neil, writes Michael Martins in the definitive history Parallel Lives. So the lonely woman bravely reached out: “Upon returning to her hotel, [Lizzie] penned a note to the actress expressing her high regard, and asked if she be allowed permission to call on her.” She sent it with a bouquet of flowers, like either a fan or suitor might.
The Honeymoon Phase
While Borden obviously knew about O’Neil, did O’Neil know about Lizzie Borden? Officially, according to a brief 1927 interview in The Sunday Standard O’Neil gave after Borden’s death, she “did not know until some time after their brief friendship began” that Borden had been accused of murdering her father and stepmother. Most historians aren’t buying that for a second. “I don’t think that’s even possible,” says Cavenaugh. “Nance was a smart lady.”
