“The autobiographical occasion (whether performance or text) becomes a site . . . ripe with diverse potentials . . . [and] can be productive in . . . articulating problems of identity and identification.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson / Actresses' autobiographies and autobiographical performances figure in several volumes on women and autobiography, but not in a number that reflects the ratio of actress-autobiography to other types of female life writing. Part of the problem is that the actress in history has represented an atypical figure, one of the few examples of women with a public life. Actresses usurped the male right to a public persona both as individuals and as a class, but without losing their subordinate and domestic role as women: this dichotomy is inevitably manifest in the actress-autobiographer's writing. This chapter offers both an overview of actresses' autobiography to 1939 and a model for reading these works for their 'diverse potentials'. It embraces the autobiographical work of performers from the 'beginnings' of the publication of actresses' autobiographies to the point in the 1930s where the 'autobiographical act' had stabilised as a commodity. The number of actress-autobiographers examined is inevitably limited by space, the range discussed intentionally diverse, situating the famous alongside the less well known, the Shakespearean alongside the musical comedy performer.