Early Life and Career
Young was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She was an actress early in her career with both the Viola Allen and E. H. Sothern Broadway (New York) companies before working for the music publisher Isidore Witmark. As a playwright, her first work, Lord Byron, was produced in 1900 by actor-producer James Young, to whom she was married from 1904 to 1910. He was later married to the silent film actress Clara Kimball.
Young's Brown of Harvard, which opened in 1906 at Princess Theatre and is the basis for a silent movie from 1911, is the first Broadway play written by Young and contains her song "When Love Is Young". This was followed by the 1907 comic play The Boys of Company "B" which premiered at the Lyceum Theatre and featured Florence Nash in her Broadway debut. The Lancers was a 1907 musical with music and lyrics by Cecilia Loftus and George Spink. Glorious Betsy, a 1908 play that was remade as a silent film of the same name in 1928 directed by Alan Crosland, was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay. The play The Lottery Man opened at Bijou Theatre in 1909 and ran for 200 performances. The film version from 1916 featured Oliver Hardy. Ragged Robin, a musical set in Ireland in 1830, is based on a book by Young. It opened at Academy of Music in 1910 and ran for only 16 performances.
Read more about this topic: Rida Johnson Young
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