Gunning was born on April 1, 1878, in
Boston, Massachusetts, and later lived in
Brooklyn, New York, where her father was a
Baptist minister. Her mother, Mary Gunning, was a choir director who, besides her daughter, also trained the
silent film actress
Lucille Lee Stewart. Gunning made her first stage appearances as a chorus singer in a
Frank Daniels show and later as a solo act singing Scottish ballads. In 1897 (around the time of her parents' divorce) she appeared in a New York production of
The Circus Girl, followed in rapid succession by performances in the
Charles H. Hoyt farce comedies
A Stranger in New York,
A Milk White Flag and
A Day and a Night. In the fall of 1899 she sang in the Rogers Brothers hit farce musical
The Roger Brothers in Wall Street at the old
Victoria Theatre, New York. In 1902 Gunning sang
It Seems Like Yesterday in the Isidore Witmark and Frederic Ranken musical comedy
The Chaperons at the Cherry Blossom Theatre, Washington, D. C. and the following year at the
Herald Square Theatre she played Arabella in the musical
Mr. Pickwick, from the
Charles Dickens novel
The Pickwick Papers. By the fall of 1903 Gunning was touring with Frank Daniel's company playing Euphemia in
The Office Boy by
Engländer and
Smith, and the following year she appeared at the
Broadway Theatre as Laura Skeffington in the
Stang and
Edwards musical comedy, ''Love's Lottery
. Gunning was Pepi Gloeckner in The White Hen by Gustave Kerker and Roderic C. Penfield in February 1906 at the Casino Theatre, and later that year starred in vaudeville with the Shubert organization in the light opera Véronique. She played Sophia in November 1907 in the comic opera Tom Jones at the Astor Theatre, and in October 1908 the title role in the Frank Pixley and Gustave Luders comic operetta, Marcelle'', staged at the Casino Theatre. In 1915 she began a series of vaudeville singing engagements that would continue into the early 1920s. ==Personal life==