Why Is Katherine Alexander Important

Katherine Alexander Although there are several amazing people that came from Arkansas one of my favorites is Katherine Alexander. Katherine Alexander is my favorite actress from Arkansas because she worked constantly doing what she loved. Katherine was born September 22, 1898, at Fort Smith, Arkansas, she was one eighth Cherokee Indian. Her mother’s name was Sophronia she was part Cherokee. Her father was Josiah Alexander, he farmed land near by in the indian territory while living with his family on this side of the river. Katherine's father died when she was almost sixteen (Jones, Ray). Shortly after her father passed her mother moved them to Baltimore her mother was a frustrated musician , saw that Katherine received a formal musical education and learned to play the violin. Later her mother moved her to New York to get further training. Why she was between engagements and her career of
becoming an actress she later came back to Fort Smith to visit family and babysit her nieces and nephews. In her late teen she was casted in a play they needed an actress who could play the violin. Around this time she decided to tell her mother she was giving up music to pursue her dream of acting full time. Her musical abilities became her way into a profession that she enjoyed more than music and that she ultimately worked in for more than 30 years. After she won a few more parts on Broadway , she joined Jessie Bonstelle's stock company in Rhode Island. Jessie Bonstelle was an accomplished acting coach and it was under her direction that Katherine Alexander was able to further hone her innate acting skills (Ray, Jones).
In the theater on Broadway and other places, she worked almost constantly, playing lead parts and supporting roles in several plays.
According to her niece, Gordon Kelly, "She never had a big hit and she never had a bad review. Not a single one. The critics all just loved her." Some of Katherine's favorite performances she starred in were her own title roles in That Awful Mrs. Eaton, about Andrew Jackson's scandal-plagued White House hostess and as an Irish immigrant boy in Little Old New York. In 1925, she married Broadway producer William A. Brady Jr. she had one daughter with him named, Barbara. Even though she had a family, she never abandoned them or her career. She and Brady made their home in New Jersey where they lived on a farm and had horses and dogs. Katherine Alexander made a two-hour trip by train to the theaters on Broadway, returning immediately afterward to be with her daughter and husband. Although she enjoyed socializing, counting among her friends and contemporaries, Helen Hayes and Humphrey Bogart, she was more oriented toward family than high
society.
By 1933, as for many during the depression, money became harder to get for her family. In 1935 it became even more harder to make money when her husband died in 1935. Shortly after Katherine won then-lucrative with metro goldwyn