Margaret Mitchell (actress)

Margaret Julia Mitchell (popularly known as Maggie Mitchell) (1832–1918) was an American actress, born in New York City. She made her first regular appearance as Julia in The Soldier's Daughter at the Chambers Street Theatre in 1851. The parts in which she was best liked were Jane Eyre, Mignon, Little Barefoot, and Fanchon the Cricket. An early marriage in the 1850s produced her son Julian Mitchell. She was married to her second husband Henry Paddock, her manager, in 1868, and they had two children Fanchon and Harry M. Paddock. They divorced twenty years later and she was wed to Charles Abbott, and retired from the stage to live in New York. Notably she was the mother of Julian P. Mitchell, a musical comedy director associated with Weber & Fields and Florenz Ziegfeld. After her death on March 22, 1918, Maggie Mitchell was interred in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Maggie Mitchell's mother was born Hannah Dodson in Knaresborough, Yorkshire. She married John Lomax, a native of Bolton, and emigrated to the USA in 1830. In 1832, they were preparing to return to England to escape an epidemic of cholera, but Lomax died before they sailed. Hannah afterward married Charles Mitchell, a native of Scotland, to whom Lomax's stationery business had been sold. Mitchell's cousin, Joseph Dodson Greenhalgh, recalled stories that circulated in the English side of the family about the actress's salary, her servants, accoutrements and jewellery .