Cissie Loftus. Versatile Music Hall Entertainer and Actress

Taken largely from contemporary newspapers, this is the biography of Music Hall star Cissie (Cecilia) Loftus, whose career also spanned the serious stage, movies and radio, first successfully bursting onto the sage at the young age of 17. Much loved in her time but now mostly a forgotten name, she showed her versatility through published stories, music and lyrics and sketches. As well as a musician, dancer and stand-up comedian, she was mostly known, respected and loved for her skills in impersonation of any manner and any voice. She was never far from controversy which was ever a part of an independent and energetic life in the public glare, and her career runs parallel with the Music Hall itself from the heights of its 1890’s success, to the reduction in its popularity by the production and development of film.
The Music Hall itself is a history of attitudes and collective expression written, in effect, by the audiences and reflected by the performers on the stage, each giving the other what they wanted. Within the attitudes of the day in the western world, Cissie’s life, along with her fellow performers took in the confusion and unfairness of race and sexuality, the effects of a colonial heritage in the self-consciousness of national identity, a suffragette sympathy with its celebrated march through London, a compassion shown to poverty and distress during a devastating world war and her own struggle with identity and illness. After a celebrated drugs bust in 1922 from which she emerged triumphantly from her addiction, she settled into a less hectic career and a quieter role which included the celluloid of Hollywood as it evolved from the stage, Music Hall and vaudeville.