Her father was Col. Ernest Karl Stahl, a Prussian-born newspaperman who was drama and music critic for a newspaper called the Chicago InterOcean and her mother, Catherine McDonald, was born in Canada to a Scottish father and Irish mother. Rose Stahl was born in Montreal and spent her formative years in Chicago, Illinois, where her father worked. She later moved to Trenton, New Jersey when Col. Stahl became editor of the Trenton Herald. She made her début in Philadelphia in 1887, toured with Daniel E. Bandmann in 1888, and appeared in New York in 1897. In 1902–03 she starred as Janice Meredith in a road touring version of the play of that name. She first appeared in her rôle of Patricia O'Brien in 1904 in the sketch called The Chorus Girl, which she carried to London in 1906, and she reappeared in New York in the revised four-act play, The Chorus Lady, in which she made a sensation and which continued to be her vehicle until 1911. Afterward she played in Maggie Pepper with Beatrice Prentice playing a supporting rôle, Moonlight Mary, etc. As with many turn of the century stage stars, Stahl showed no interest in the new medium of motion pictures when the fledgling studios came courting stage stars around 1912. Like David Warfield, she starred in a handful of plays, became famous for them, and played them for many years. Stahl was married twice. First to E. P. Sullivan, an actor famous for starring in the hugely popular play and later filmThe Black Crook; they divorced in the mid-1890s. Her second husband was William Bonelli, an actor whom she wed in October 1895. This marriage lasted until Bonelli's death. She bore no children in either marriage.
Note
In the 1980 filmSomewhere in Time, Christopher Reeve played a journalist researching an Edwardian actress in the library of a large hotel. Reeve pulls out a cache of photos and one of the photos shows a child standing holding a doll. The child is Stahl; the same photo appears in Stahl's biographical entry in Daniel Blum's 1954 2nd edition Great Stars of the American Stage.
