Occupation Actor and singer Role Singer Name W. Bradfield | Spouse(s) Jessie B. Best Years active 1889 – 1918 | |
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Full Name Walter Louis Bradfield Born 13 June 1866 ( 1866-06-13 ) London, England Died 1919, Brighton, United Kingdom | ||
Walter Louis Bradfield (1866–1919), was an English actor and singer.
Biography
The son of William Bradfield, a civil servant, Bradfield was born on 13 June 1866, educated at the Grocers' School, Hackney, and first appeared on stage in 1889 in a pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham. In 1888, before taking up the theatrical life, he had married Jessie B. Best.
Bradfield's notable roles include playing the leading man, Captain Coddington, in the Broadway production of the musical comedy In Town, which opened in New York in 1897, in which Bradfield played a hard-up army officer who takes all the actresses of the Ambiguity Theatre out to lunch and marries one of them.
His other stage engagements in leading roles, most of them in London's West End, included A Gaiety Girl (1893–1894), as Bobbie Rivers; The Geisha (1896), as Dick Cunningham; The Girl from Kays (1902–1903), as Harry Gordon; The Little Michus (1905–1906); and The Merveilleuses (1906–1907), as Lagorille, the Incroyable.
On 4 September 1905 Bradfield played in a one-day cricket match at Lord's, representing 'The Actors' against 'The Jockeys'. He scored six runs and was bowled by Chaloner.
In 1908 The Actors' Birthday Book said of Bradfield -
"A right merry operatic jester is W. Louis Bradfield, and the London public is so enamored of his comicalities that he is never allowed to stay very far from the British capital... first becoming a London favorite in 1893, appearing at the Gaiety in "The Gaiety Girl" and "In Town".
He died at Brighton on 12 August 1919.