A versatile and accomplished young amateur actress, Grace Hayward became a professional before she was 20. Her parents, George and Alida (Carpenter) Hayward, moved from Terre Haute, Indiana, where Grace was born, to Mt. Carmel, Ill. when Grace was in high school. During the 1890s she performed with "Ferris Comedians," a traveling troupe, and eventually married Richard Ferris, the head of the company. Ferris promoted her for a time as "The Grace Hayward Company." When her marriage began to disintegrate, Hayward formed her own repertory company, traveling around the theater-vaudville circuit, presenting and acting in plays, many of which she wrote. In 1902, she acquired the rights to "Graustark: The Story of a Love Behind the Throne," a best-selling novel by George Barr McCutcheon, and dramatized it. She did the same for "St. Elmo" and "Truxton King." All three were made into motion pictures but it is unclear as to whether Hayward's dramatizations were used in the productions. 

After she and Ferris divorced, she married George Mahan Gatts. During the Twenties and early Thirties, Hayward and Gatts toured the country presenting many of her original plays. One of them was "Her Unborn Child," which opened at Etlinge's 42nd Street Theater in New York on March 5, 1928. After the motion picture was made, Hayward published a novelization of the story. During the Depression, she was commissioned to write a play for Civilian Conservation Corps camps. It was titled, "The CCC Murder Mystery," and reputedly was presented at least 1,000 times. 

The Gatts retired to Los Angeles, probably in the early forties. George died on April 8, 1949, and Grace died January 7, 1959 at age 90.

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Grace Hayward

Writer