Stella Hammerstein Stella Hammerstein Stella Hammerstein was an American actress. She was sometimes billed as Stella Steele. Hammerstein was the daughter of Oscar Hammerstein I and Malvina Jacobi Hammerstein, both of whom initially opposed her going into show business as a profession. In 1908, she told a "New York Times" reporter of her father's reaction when, at age 20, she told him that she was going into musical comedy: "Papa without more ado piled me over his knee and applied the hairbrush vigorously." Eventually he accepted her desire to be an actress. In 1902, Hammerstein joined the stock theater company headed by
Oscar Hammerstein I own. Infamously, he compared paying his daughters to "the eccentricities and actions of the late lamented King Lear." Hammerstein contracted kidney problems and paralysis, eventually permanently falling into a coma. He died in 1919 in Lenox Hill Hospital at Park Avenue and 77th Street in Manhattan. His contractual ban on presenting opera was due to expire in 1920; at his death he was busy planning his return to the opera stage. A 1910 song by Jack Norworth entitled "For Months and Months and Months" references Hammerstein himself, during the first verse. The Manhattan Opera House was bid for $145,000 by