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Billie Burke

American stage and film actress (1884–1970)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 9, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Mary William Ethelbert Appleton "Billie" Burke was an American character actress who was famous on Broadway and radio, and in silent and sound films. She is perhaps best known to modern audiences as Glinda the Good Witch of the North in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film musical The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Billie Burke” as american stage and film actress (1884–1970). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Billie, Burke and American.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1939—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Billie, Burke and American providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Billie Burke”, the useful work is to connect “american stage and film actress (1884–1970)” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1939.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Billie Burke”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Billie Burke primary sources, Billie Burke archive and Billie research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Billie Burke”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Billie Burke” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.