page_title: Mary Eaton
section_title: Professional theatre
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Eaton / Biography / Professional theatre
caption_attribution_description: English: Mary Eaton, from a 1923 publication. Photo by Victor Georg.
context_page_description: Mary Eaton was an American stage actress, singer, and dancer in the 1910s and 1920s, probably best known today from her appearance in the first Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts. A professional performer since childhood, she enjoyed success in stage productions such as the Ziegfeld Follies. She appeared in another early sound film Glorifying the American Girl. Her career declined sharply by the mid-1930s and a battle with alcoholism led to her premature death in 1948 from liver failure.
context_section_description: Of all of the Eatons, Mary was perhaps the more famous and the more popular. An exceptionally talented dancer, she earned raves in a production of Intime in Washington, DC in 1917.
  In 1916, she made her Broadway debut, dancing a ballet specialty in Follow Me. The next year, she performed in the Shubert Brothers' Over the Top with Fred and Adele Astaire. Throughout the 1920s, Eaton was a constant presence on Broadway, appearing in eight different productions.
  She was featured in three editions of the Ziegfeld Follies, those of 1920, 1921, and 1922. Eaton's trademark dance routine, which she performed in the Follies, involved a complicated sequence of pirouettes around the stage en pointe.
caption: 1923
exif: {}