Pauline Markham was an Anglo-American dancer and contralto singer active on burlesque and vaudeville stages during the latter decades of the 19th century. She began by performing juvenile rôles in Manchester, made her debut on the London stage at 20 and a year later New York as a member of the British Blondes which introduced Victorian burlesque to America, where for a few years she would find phenomenal success before her career settled into a long steady decline.
The critic Richard Grant White once described Markham's singing as vocal velvet and her arms as the lost arms of the Venus de Milo. Markham had studied singing with Manuel García at the Royal Academy of Music in London.