Marie St Denis was an actress whose stage career spanned two years in Melbourne and Adelaide. Her suicide in 1868 was widely (and, at times, sensationally) reported in colonial newspapers. According to some of the reports, St Denis had literary pretensions and had submitted her writing to journals in Melbourne but had not met with any success.
St Denis was buried at the Melbourne General Cemetery on 26 October 1868; her gravesite was moved several days later. Newspaper reports of the day indicated that St Denis had requested an inscription on her headstone: 'One who loved not wisely, but too well' (from Shakespeare's Othello). It is unlikely that this request was ever fulfilled. St Denis's birth name (Alice Maes) does appear on a later headstone that includes her mother, sister, neice and nephew.
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