page_title: Zelda Sears
section_title: Acting and writing careers
hierarchical_section_title: Zelda Sears / Acting and writing careers
caption_attribution_description: postcard with scene from Anne Caldwell's "The Nest Egg," with Zelda Sears; Park Theatre, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
context_page_description: Zelda Sears was an American actress, screenwriter, novelist and businesswoman.
context_section_description: In 1892, she married actor Herbert E. Sears, and would continue to use his name professionally after the dissolution of their marriage three years later. She got her foot in the door of the Chicago Herald newspaper by contributing to its humor column. When her father died, Sears began reading the numerous play scripts in his extensive personal library, adding to her already considerable interest in the profession. Actress Sarah Bernhardt performed in at Chicago's Daly Theater in 1894, and Sears initially set out to secure an interview with the star for the Herald. She ended up being hired as an extra in the production, changing the course of her professional life. Later continuing with a local acting stock company, and honing her craft with Hart Conway's American Conservatory of Acting, she eventually relocated to New York. Producer A.L. Erlanger offered her a small role as one of the ballerinas, a skill she had to learn on the job, in the 1896 production of  Jack and the Beanstalk at the Casino Theatre. She spent the next few years expanding her skills with traveling stock companies.
  As she continued to pursue acting roles, Sears operated her own public stenography/typewriting service in New York, near the Empire Theatre on Broadway.  Her clients were theatre people, playwrights. She soon developed into a proficient script doctor, with an eye towards becoming a playwright herself. It was during her 1900 performance as the jealous murderess La Colombe in Wine and Women at the Boston Theatre, that she met her future collaborator, playwright Clyde Fitch. He offered her a part in his new play Lover's Lane. While continuing her professional relationship with Fitch, including as his script doctor, she took a full-time job with theatrical producer Henry Wilson Savage. The company's vice president Louis C. Wiswell would eventually become her second husband. Under Fitch's influence, performing in seven plays written by him, she began to develop the stage persona she would become most identified with, a spinster wise in years but eternally yearning for marriage. Journalist Ada Patterson would later proclaim Sears "The Greatest of Stage Old Maids".
  She began writing for films at the request of Cecil B. DeMille and MGM in the early 1920s, and continued to do so for more than a decade.
caption: Scene from Anne Caldwell's The Nest Egg with Zelda Sears at the Park Theatre, Boston, Massachusetts, ca.1911
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