Laura Case Sherry was descended from one of the oldest families of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin and was a playmate of Virginia and Violet Dousman. Her father was Lawrence Case, a well-known merchant of Prairie du Chien.
She attended the University of Wisconsin and graduated from the Northwestern University School of Speech and the Empire Theatre Dramatic School in New York. Between 1897 and 1899 Laura Case traveled with the Richard Mansfield Stock Company as an ingenue. In 1902 she married Edward Paddock Sherry. They had one son, Avery.
Laura Sherry was a schoolmate of Rachel Crowthers; became a friend of Zona Gale, Lew Sarett, Harriet Monroe, and Robert Sherwood; and was a patron of Carl Sandburg early in the century. In 1909 Professor Thomas H. Dickinson, of the University of Wisconsin, Zona Gale, and Laura Sherry organized the Wisconsin Dramatic Society, the first experimental theatre group in this country. Out of this came The Wisconsin Players of Milwaukee, a small company of theatrical amateurs of which Mrs. Sherry was the moving spirit and chief financial backer. The “Players” of Milwaukee became a workshop in the Little Theatre movement, and served as the training ground for future stage and radio stars.
From November 1918 to June 1919, through the YMCA, Mrs. Sherry served as director of plays for the entertainment of soldiers in France, acting as well as directing. Through the twenties and thirties she was active in the Wisconsin Players organization of Milwaukee, part of the time as its director. She lectured frequently in Wisconsin cities and those of neighboring states; and wrote plays and pantomime ballets. Mrs. Sherry once took The Wisconsin Players to New York for an engagement.
Mrs. Sherry was widely traveled, and made many trips abroad, especially to Paris and once to Moscow, to study the theatre. In 1935 she helped Wolfson produce an English stage version of Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment. Her book of poems, Old Prairie du Chien, published in a limited edition in 1931, was distinctive in that she “captured the humor of the early French settlers by using the picturesque dialect” she had learned as a child.
During World War II Mrs. Sherry worked in a canteen for merchant marines in New York City. In later years she usually wintered in New York and spent the summer in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. She died April 19, 1947 at her apartment in the Beverly Hotel, New York.
