Cleo Desmond

Born Matilda Minnie Hatfield in 1888 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was an actress of stage and screen. Active in the entertainment field from the 1900s til the 1940s. She performed in vaudeville under her original name, first with 'Parson Johnon's Flock,' a big attraction that played Hyde and Behman's Theater in Brooklyn, New York (1901), then with Joseph J Flynn's Nashville Students (a group organized in NYC, not the original famous group founded by P.T. Wright), which toured for a season of fifteen weeks in and around NYC (1902). At what point she joined the Williams & Walker Company is not known, but she toured Europe with that famous troupe (possibly 1902-1908), taking the stage name Cleo Desmond.

In 1909 she performed with Ed Brayer's 'Georgia Campers,' a vaudeville ensemble presenting songs and dances of the South, which played at the Green Point Theater in Brooklyn, NYC. With this act, she and her dancing partner Clarence Bowens, as the team of Desmond & Bowens, performed a so called lazy coon dance. She also performed a solo "song recitations," wearing a seductive, "split to the hips" sheath skirt. Her last recorded vaudeville engagement was in a sister act, billed as Desmond & Bailey (partner unknown), a performance of songs and monologues, which played at the Columbia Theater in NYC (1909).

Beginning in 1916, as a former member of the Anita Bush All-Colored Dramatic Stock Company she became a member of the original company of Lafayette Players at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, NYC, where she soon established herself as one of the company's featured players (circa 1916-1922), best remembered for her role as the landlady in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

She performed in several all-Black films of Oscar Micheaux. In 1938 she performed in the Los Angelos production of Hall Johnson's 'Run Little Chillun!'

She died in 1958, in San Diego, at the age of 70.

Sources: The Competitor vol. 1, 1920; Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816-1960 by Bernard L. Peterson