page_title: Macarte Sisters
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Macarte Sisters / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: The trapeze and strongwoman act the Sisters Macarte cropped from The Sporting &amp; Theatrical Journal (1897)
context_page_description: The Macarte Sisters were a trapeze and high wire act of the late 19th and early 20th-centuries noted for their feats of strength during their performance.
context_section_description: They were born into a dynasty of acrobatic and circus performers dating back at least to the early 19th-century (they claimed to the early 18th) who all adopted the surname Macarte in place of their actual surname of Macarthy.  An earlier generation of females in the family - their aunts- were using the stage name 'Sisters Macarte' from at least 1870.
  Their parents were Regina née Mauthner (1860–1892), a Budapest-born Hungarian acrobat and dancer with the Hungarian ballet, and Lambeth-born Henry Macarthy (1853–1924), a circus acrobat who had been performing since the age of 6. They married in the British Embassy in Vienna in 1877. Their grandparents Michael 'John' Macarthy (1820–1856) and Marie Elizabeth Macarte née Ginnett (1827–1892) ran Macarte’s Monster Circus in the 1850s. It is claimed that another relative was Thomas Macarte (1839–1872), known as Massarti the Lion Tamer, who performed with a travelling lion act. Performing his act in Bolton in 1872 he was attacked by the lions but despite his attempts to fight them off was dragged away and killed.
  The four diminutive sisters (the tallest was just 5 feet 1½ inches in height) were: Julia Macarthy (1878–1958); Adelaide Macarthy (1879–1908); Cecilia Macarthy (1881–after 1939); and Harriet 'Hattie' Macarthy (1889–1955), who was not part of the act. Harriet's son Peter Macarte was an actor in the 1950s. A fifth sister, Blanche Macarthy, died in infancy. All the sisters were born in Hamburg in Germany, where their parents had married in 1877. On the 1891 British Census Henry and Regina Macarte and their three oldest daughters were all listed as 'Theatrical Professionals'. In 1922 Cecilia Macarte married David Carter.
caption: The Sisters Macarte in The Sporting & Theatrical Journal (1897)
exif: {}