Margaret Mary Marlowe, actress, author and journalist, was the only child of Victorian-born parents John Shanahan, grazier, and his wife Margaret (daughter of Sir John O'Shanassy, one-time Premier of Victoria). Determined from an early age to go on the stage, she joined Julius Knight's company in about 1907 as Mary Marlowe, the name she was known by from then on. She left Australia in 1910 to pursue an acting career, something considered disreputable by her middle-class Catholic family. In March 1912 Marlowe joined Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan's company in Sydney. She was the original 'Kate Rudd' in the famous dramatisation of On Our Selection (q.v.) in May 1912.
Marlowe went overseas in 1913 and, after achieving a measure of success in England and North America, she turned to writing and published two novels before returning to Australia in 1920. She became a journalist with the Sydney Sun, where the Sun Junior boys included Alan Reid (q.v.) and D'Arcy Niland (q.v.). Peter Finch, who later became a successful actor, was another. As 'Puck', Marlowe wrote a theatre column for the Sydney Sunday Sun and later made a name in radio as a commentator and as an interviewer of theatrical personalities. She continued to run a 'Dorothy Dix' column after she retired from the Sun in 1946 to live in her cottage at Newport Beach.
Some of her romantic novels were serialised; for example, The Toll Gate of Mars was serialised in the All Story Magazine, New York, in 1917; A Child by Proxy and Said the Spider were serialised in The Australian Woman's Mirror in 1925 and 1928 respectively. The State Library of New South Wales holds a large volume of her papers, including unpublished manuscripts.
