May Irwin

For a stage performer in any era it’s a long way from anywhere to Broadway, but it must have seemed an impossible distance in rural Canada five years before confederation. Robert Campbell and his wife Jane Draper, immigrants from Scotland, could not have imagined the fame New York’s Great White Way would bring their daughter, May, when she came into this world on June 27, 1862. May was born in Whitby, Ontario, now just a short drive east of Toronto.

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