Ada Edney

(b. **/**/1895? - d. **/**/****). Actress. Little is known about her, but Ada Edney was a member of the Howitt-Phillips Company that had arrived in the Far East from East Africa in 1914 and performed at the Palladium in Singapore in the plays Diplomacy and Raffles in March 1915. In April the following year she was back there with the Melbourne Comedy Company, this time at the Alhambra and she was still with them in September, for in a Dutch-language newspaper published in Batavia, Tom and Eileen Melbourne and Ada Edney offered a reward for the return of three music books. In December 1926, Miss Ada Edney, “soprano and soubrette” performed at the Strand Theatre in Singleton (NSW) with the Rev. Frank W. Gorman, an American clergyman who had turned to vaudeville and was popularly known as “The Singing Parson”.

In between she was in South Africa and acted in Joseph Albrecht’s film version of Henry Seton Merriman’s novel With Edged Tools (1919) as the girl who nurses the hero (Charles Sparrow) back to health and eventually marries him. She also appeared on the stage in Xtra Speshul with George Taylor at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg in September 1919 and played the fairy in Pantomime Pie at the Tivoli in Cape Town in December of that year as a member of the New Musical Comedy Company. There is no certainty about where she was born, but a newspaper published in New South Wales refers to her as "the charming Australian soubrette". (FO}

Sources

The Straits Times, 26 March 1915

The Straits Times, 27 March 1915

The Straits Times, 17 April 1916

Het Nieuws van de Dag, Batavia, 17 September 1916

Singleton Argus, 16 December 1926

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