Amy Ricard

Amy Ricard was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Denver, Colorado.[1] Her mother was Emma A. Ricard.[2] She studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.[3] She also trained as a soprano singer, with Horton Kennedy.[4]

Amy Ricard in The Torches, from a 1917 publication.

Ricard appeared in Broadway in The Pride of Jennico (1900), Janice Meredith (1900-1901), The Stubbornness of Geraldine by Clyde Fitch (1902),[5] Babes in Toyland by Victor Herbert (1903-1904),[6][7] The College Widow (1904-1905),[8] Mary and John (1905), Matilda (1906-1907), The Literary Sense (1908), The Reckoning (1908),[9] Girls by Clyde Fitch (1908 and 1909), The Torches (1917),[10] The Woman on the Index (1918), and Those Who Walk in Darkness (1919).[11] On the Boston stage, with her husband Lester Lonergan, she starred in An Idyl of Erin (1910).[12]

Dorothy Parker wrote of The Woman on the Index in Vanity Fair, saying "The thing was so well done. You know yourself that with a cast including Julia Dean, Amy Ricard, and Lester Lonergan, you can't really have such a terrible evening."[13]

Amy Ricard made her political views in favor of women's suffrage public, wearing a "Votes for Women" pin and speaking at suffrage events in New York City.[14]

Amy Ricard's engagement to poet and editor Charles Hanson Towne was announced in 1908,[15][16] but she married Irish actor and playwright Lester Lonergan, as his third wife, in 1909. The couple owned a summer cottage on Indian Island in Maine, which was among the buildings removed by the Portland Water District in 1922 to return the island to an undeveloped state.[17] Ricard was widowed in 1931,[18] and she died in 1937, aged 55, in New York City.[19][20]

• Amy Ricard at the Internet Broadway Database
• Amy Ricard Lonergan's gravesite on Find a Grave.
• A photo of Laura Nelson Hall, Ruth Maycliffe, and Amy Ricard in Girls, from the American Vaudeville Museum Archive, Special Collections, University of Arizona Libraries.