Hopper was born on January 17, 1872 as Edna Margaret Augusta Wallace in San Francisco, California to Josephine and Waller Wallace. Hopper claimed her birth records were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Her father was the head night usher at the California Theater. She had one sibling. Hopper trained for the stage in New York. While there, she had married DeWolf Hopper on June 28, 1893. They appeared in several comic operas together, including John Philip Sousa's El Capitan, before divorcing in 1898. The couple presented a striking physical contrast on stage. DeWolf, at 6 ft 5 in, was tall for that time, while Hopper stood under five feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds. Hopper starred in her most famous role, Lady Holyrood in the popular musical Florodora, which had premiered in London. Though not part of the renowned Florodora Sextette, she shared in some of the wild adulation of male admirers who mobbed the stage door after every performance. Hopper remained active over the next decade, starring in George M. Cohan's Fifty Miles from Boston in 1907. She married Wall Street broker Albert Oldfield Brown in 1908. Her professional activity lessened in the 1910s but resumed in the 1920s. One of the earlier stage actors to have a facelift, Wallace Hopper had the operation filmed and then made personal appearance tours over the next eight years showing the film and revealing beauty tips. Her name became associated with a line of personal care products and cosmetics, Edna Wallace Hopper Cosmetics, sold by American Home Products. In 1953 she performed the same role she had begun her acting career with in 1893, at the final performance at the Empire Theater in Manhattan, which was scheduled for demolition. The June 8, 1953 issue of Life Magazine featured an article on Hopper, considering her a popular stage actress and singer during the turn of the 20th Century. Hopper separated from her second husband, and he later died on March 5, 1945. She went on to become the only woman of the thirty-six member board of L. F. Rothschild & Co. Hopper died on December 14, 1959 in New York City. She is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California.
