Grace LaRue on AllMovie

A major musical comedy star in the first two decades of the 20th century, Grace La Rue introduced the song "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)" to an enraptured British audience at the London Palace on August 4, 1913. That was one of the highlights of a career that had begun in the Broadway version of the British musical The Blue Moon and included two seasons in the Follies. In 1919, La Rue made her screen debut opposite Hale Hamilton in That's Good, a pastoral melodrama in which she (for now obscure reasons) was billed as Stella Gray, reportedly her real name. She married Hamilton soon after, and together they toured Europe in 1924 with the sketch Dangerous Advice and appeared in vaudeville. Retired and residing in California, Grace La Rue made a brief appearance in She Done Him Wrong (1932) as a favor to old friend and colleague Mae West, and was one of several former stage luminaries (Eddie Leonard and female impersonator Julian Eltinge also among them) making cameo appearances in Bing Crosby's If I Had My Way (1940).