The Oxford Companion to the Theatre entry (1983) for Maude Adams
Adams (Kiskadden), Maude (1872-1953), American actress, daughter of the leading lady of the Salt Lake City stock company. At the age of 5 she scored a triumphant success as Little Schmeider in Halliday's Fritz, Our German Cousin at the San Francisco theatre, and also played such parts as Little Eva in one of the many dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1888 she made her first appearance in New York, and three years later was engaged to play opposite John Drew in H.C. deMille's The Lost Paradise. She first emerged as a star with her performance as Lady Babbie in The Little Minister (1897), a part which Barrie rewrote and enlarged specially for her. Her quaint, elfin personality suited his work to perfection, and she appeared successfully in the American production of his Quality Street (1901), Peter Pan (1905), What Every Woman Knows (1908), Rosalind (1914), and A Kiss for Cinderella (1916.) She was also much admired as the young hero of Rostand's L'Aigion (1900), and in such Shakespearean parts as Viola, Juliet, and Rosalind. In 1918 she retired, not acting again until 1931, when she appeared on tour, in The Merchant of Venice, as Portia to the Shylock of Otis Skinner. In 1934 she went on tour again as Maria in Twelfth Night and in 1937 she appeared in New York in Rostand's Chantecler.
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