Dates

• Existence: 15 June 1835 - 10 August 1868

Biography

Adah Isaacs Menken was an American actress, painter and poet born on 15 June 1835.

Adah started performing as a child, first dancing and later acting. Although receiving poor reviews as an actress, she became most famous for her role in the equestrian drama Mazeppa, in which she was carried by a horse apparently naked. Mazeppa was a well-known hippodrama of the period, based on a poem by Lord Byron, in which Adah played the leading role to great success. She toured her version of Mazeppa in America, London, where she debuted at Astley’s Amphitheatre, and France.

Adah became a benefactor, sharing the fortune she made through her work with friends, theatre people in need and charities.

She also achieved notoriety for her multiple marriages and affairs. Adah married her first husband in 1855 and divorced him a year later to marry Alexander Isaac Menken, a musician from a prominent Reform Jewish family in Ohio and from whom she took her name. She married another three times and had affairs among others with Charles Blondin and Alexander Dumas.

As an author, Adah published about twenty essays, one hundred poems and a book of her collected poems.

Adah travelled between England and France between 1864 and 1868. She fell ill in London in 1868 and died shortly after in Paris on 10 August aged 33.

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