Dorchester Illustration no. 2352 Pauline Frederick, 1883-1938.
Pauline Frederick was a stage and screen actress of international reputation. This photograph was taken when she was 7 years old.
Pauline Frederick was born Pauline Beatrice Libby on August 12, 1883. She died Sept. 19, 1938. When she was about a year old, her family moved from Boston to Dorchester. In 1902 she began her career with a week’s engagement at the Boston Music Hall, and she soon moved to New York where she began in the chorus of “The Rogers Brothers in Harvard.”
Her beauty was legendary. When the sculptor, Ulric Ellerhusen, was still unknown, he saw a picture of Pauline Frederick in a magazine and chose her as his model of a typical American girl. The figure that he first created from the magazine illustration won him a prize, and he continued to use the same figure as the pattern for all his subsequent feminine models. Thus, unbeknownst to Pauline Frederick until later, “her face and figure were molded in stone and bronze for several decades and appeared on many famous buildings, gracing memorial parks, state capitols and sculptured facades. She was the figure of the twenty-one life-size statues on the Chapel of the University of Chicago and the model of Wonderment on the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, as well as the four fifty-foot figures on the State Capitol in Louisiana” among others.
Pauline Frederick played the role of Madame X and was known by this name as well.