1. Nelly Power was the stage name of Ellen Maria Lingham, an English singer, actress and popular performer in music hall, Victorian burlesque and pantomime.
10 Facts About Nelly Power
1. 2.
Nelly Power's funeral attracted three to four thousand spectators at Abney Park Cemetery and a further great crowd at the start of the procession from her home.
3.
Nelly Power had two older sisters who both died in childhood: Alice Sarah Adelaide and Agnes.
4.
Nelly Power grew up with her mother, who reverted to the name Nelly Power, and a boarder, Thomas Sheppard James, who would become her mother's second husband in 1887.
5.
Nelly Power was a performer in music hall from the age of 8 when, as a pupil of Mrs J W Gordon, she appeared, singing two comic songs, at Gordon's Music Hall in Southampton.
6.
Nelly Power continued to sing and performed impersonations and developed a comic style mimicking that of George Leybourne, which brought her fame by the age of 15.
7.
Nelly Power made her first appearance on the legitimate London stage in 1868 in the pantomime version of Robinson Crusoe at the Surrey Theatre.
8.
Nelly Power then moved to the Vaudeville Theatre performing as principal "boy" in a number of burlesque plays by Robert Reece and Henry J Byron: Don Carlos, Elizabeth Camaralzaman, The Orange Tree and the Bumble Bee, The Very Last Days of Pompeii, and Romulus and Remus.
9.
Nelly Power achieved national fame in the music halls with an act in which she caricatured dandies with comic songs such as "La-di-la".
10.
Nelly Power died from pleurisy in 1887, aged 32, and was buried at Abney Park Cemetery in London.