Louis Bradfield

Walter Louis Bradfield (1866–1919), was an English actor and singer. The son of William Bradfield, a civil servant, Bradfield was born on 13 June 1866, educated at the Grocers' School, Hackney, and first appeared on stage in 1889 in a pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham.[1] In 1888, before taking up the theatrical life, he had married Jessie B. Best.[2]

Bradfield's notable roles include playing the leading man, Captain Coddington, in the Broadway production of the musical comedy In Town, which opened in New York in 1897, in which Bradfield played a hard-up army officer who takes all the actresses of the Ambiguity Theatre out to lunch and marries one of them.

His other stage engagements in leading roles, most of them in London's West End, included A Gaiety Girl (1893–1894), as Bobbie Rivers; The Geisha (1896), as Dick Cunningham; The Girl from Kays (1902–1903), as Harry Gordon; The Little Michus (1905–1906); and The Merveilleuses (1906–1907), as Lagorille, the Incroyable.

He was the first artist to record a number from the musical Floradora, written by Leslie Stuart and recorded in Maiden Lane recording studios, London, on September 27 1900. This recording became the first number in the Peelenium. Something of his reputation at the time can be gleaned from The Actors' Birthday Book (1908): "A right merry operatic jester is W. Louis Bradfield, and the London public is so enamored of his comicalities that he is never allowed to stay very far from the British capital."

He died in Brighton on 12 August 1919.

Festive Fifty Entries

 * None

Peelenium

 * Peelenium 1900: 'I Want To Be A Military Man'

Sessions

 * None

Other Shows Played

 * 13 May 1999: 'I Want To Be A Military Man'