page_title: Doris Eaton Travis
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Doris Eaton Travis / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Doris Eaton Travis (1904-2010) in her youth (somewhere around 1910-1922).
context_page_description: Doris Eaton Travis was an American dancer, stage and film actress, dance instructor, owner and manager, writer, and rancher, who was the last surviving Ziegfeld Girl, a troupe of acclaimed chorus girls who performed as members in the Broadway theatrical revues of the Ziegfeld Follies.
  She began performing onstage as a young child and along with her siblings she was one of The Seven Little Eatons, an extended family of show-business performers, she made her Broadway debut in stage production at the age of 13 and a year later she was cast as a member of the famed Ziegfeld Follies as the youngest ever cast in the show. She continued to perform in stage productions and silent films throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. When her career in stage and screen declined, Travis started a second career as an dance instructor for the Arthur Murray and was a local television personality in Detroit. Her association with Arthur Murray lasted for three decades, during which time she rose through the ranks to own and manage a chain of nearly twenty schools.
context_section_description: She was one of seven children born to Mary (née Saunders) and Charles H. Eaton in Norfolk, Virginia. She was raised as a Christian Scientist and remained a practitioner for the rest of her life. At the age of four, Travis began attending dance lessons in Washington, D.C., along with her sisters Mary and Pearl Eaton. In 1911, all three sisters were hired for a production of Maurice Maeterlinck's fantasy play The Blue Bird at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C. While Travis had a minor role in the show, as a sleeping child in the "Palace of Night" scene, it marked the beginning of her career in professional theatre.
caption: Doris Eaton Travis in her youth
exif: {}