W. Louis Bradfield

Who is W. Louis Bradfield?

W. Louis Bradfield, in full Walter Louis Bradfield, 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. In 1888, before taking up the theatrical life, he had married Jessie B. Best.

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 an impecunious 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, as Bobbie Rivers, The Geisha, as Dick Cunningham, The Girl from Kays, as Harry Gordon, The Little Michus, and The Merveilleuses, as Lagorille, the Incroyable.

On 4 September 1905 he played in a one-day cricket match at Lord's, representing 'The Actors' against 'The Jockeys'. He scored six runs and was bowled by Chaloner.

In 1908 The Actors' Birthday Book said of Bradfield -