HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CLARA MORRIS
          THE AMERICAN BERNHARDT
       (March 17, 1847 - November 20, 1925)

Clara Morris is one of the five actresses featured in Stage Struck:
From Kemble To Kate produced by the Society for the Preservation of Theatrical History at the Snapple Theater Center on December 12, 2013.  As the founder of the Society and a theatre historian, my love affair with Clara began when I found her three autobiographies in a book barn somewhere in Maine. I devoured the books because they all connected me with the history of the actress's journey in the nineteenth century.  According to her biographer, Barbara Grossman, she wrote over 50 volumes of diaries.  I have been wanting to do a one woman show about her life, its challenges and triumphs, a sort of Horatio Alger story as she went from severe poverty to financial independence. And the fact that she was a published author of fiction, a prolific writer of magazine features and contributed articles to many publications amazed me. She had not had any formal education. She learned to read and write as a child, but her teacher was the theatre and the people she met and acted with during her lifetime.  The one woman show is not a reality yet but the fact that the solo piece I created for Stage Struck might be a starting point is my objective. It is also a possibility for the other actresses who researched and fell in love with their women: Fanny Kemble, Alla Nazimova, Mrs. Fiske and Katharine Hepburn.  My feature about Clara today is from the biography I contributed to the Stage Struck program.

 Clara grew up in the shadow of poverty.  Her mother's sewing, cooking and housekeeping skills kept her employed in a number of boarding houses. She was able to keep Clara with her as long as she remained silent and still. Clara's love of reading and telling stories to the boarders caught the attention of teenaged Blanche Bradshaw who felt that Clara could gain work as a ballet girl in the ensemble at John Ellsler's Academy of Music in Cleveland. After a nervous introduction, Ellsler saw something in her and engaged her for two weeks. From the ensemble she was given small parts, then larger roles and at 16 she played Queen Gertrude opposite Edwin Booth's Hamlet. During her eight years with the Ellslers she played many roles from Shakespeare's heroines to Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin. She became a favorite actress in the city but when an opportunity to play leading roles at Wood's Theatre in Cincinnati was offered her in the late 1860s she accepted.  Intent upon getting to New York, she asked Mr. Ellsler to write some managers on her behalf.  Lester Wallack ignored the letter, Edwin Booth had already engaged someone else, but Augustin Daly said he would see her.  He offered her $35 a week to start, a salary that had to support her and her mother, and would be doubled if she made a favorable impression. Her salary enabled her and her mother to eat meat once a day. On September 13, 1870, she made a triumphant New York debut at Daly's Theatre playing the lead role of Anne Sylvester in Man and Wife and earning five curtain calls!  In 1873 after playing several starring parts including the sensational Cora in Article 47, she left Daly's management to join A. M. Palmer's company in The Geneva Cross, the biggest hit of the season.

     Clara performed in over 80 productions for three decades. She traveled throughout the country and Canada and audiences were extremely moved by her emotional power. Camille was among her greatest roles although at first she was against doing it. Palmer convinced her she must to it for a benefit during the season of 1874-75 when the suffering of the poor during a 'dreadful winter' was so horrible that the actors were the first to offer help. Having never played Camille she got the book and studied all night "while my mother worked the coffee pot". After the performance, Palmer wrote a note to her saying she had scored the hit of her life.
     Critics have said that she acted with her nerves, shed real tears and felt every part she was playing. However she was known to use so much energy that she experienced cold, fever, and periods of total collapse and disease, suffering untold physical and mental torture. Theatres at which she was playing had to be closed and audiences dismissed because she was unable to appear.
     William Winter, the most renowned theatre historian and critic of the nineteenth century, wrote about Ms. Morris in Shadows of the Stage (1893). "Her conquest was through the emotions. Her method was controlled by taste and made symmetrical by repose. Her best moments were those of frenzy, as when love struggles in the heart with knowledge that it is wasted and in vain...but even in the wildest of those moments she displayed an artist's control of herself and her resources."

    She retired from the stage in 1900 and began her new journey as an author and also appeared as a lecturer on the vaudeville circuit.  Her last stage performance was in 1904 in The Two Orphans and in 1909 she recreated Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene at a star-studded benefit in her honor sponsored by the Twelfth Night Club.