Sophia Baddeley

Sophia Baddeley (1745 - 1786), English actress and singer, was born in London, the daughter of a sergeant-trumpeter named Snow. She was a woman of great beauty, but excessive vanity and notorious conduct. At the age of eighteen she ran away with the actor Robert Baddeley, then acting at Drury Lane, and she herself made her first appearance on the stage there on the 27th of April 1765, as Ophelia in Hamlet. Later, as a singer, she obtained engagements at Ranelagh and Vauxhall. Though separated from her husband on account of her misconduct, she still played several years in the same company. Her beauty and her extravagance rendered her celebrated, but the money which she made in all sorts of ways was so freely squandered that she was obliged to take refuge from her creditors in Edinburgh, where she made her last appearance on the stage in 1784.

See Memoirs of Mistress Sophia Baddeley, by Mrs Elizabeth Steele, 6 vols. (1781).