HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HELEN WESTLEY!
(March 28, 1875 - December 12, 1942)

Born Henrietta Remsen Meserole Manney,  Helen who married John Westley, a Broadway actor in 1900 until their divorce in 1912, was a member of the original board of the Theatre Guild, appearing in Peer Gynt, Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma, and The Apple Cart.  She also appeared in two plays which would be turned into classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals: Green Grow the Lilacs became Oklahoma! and Liliom,  which became Carousel.  She player Aunt Eller and Mrs. Muskat (who became Mrs. Mullin in Carousel).
     After her divorce, she became a member of Greenwich Village's Liberal Club which counted Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Susan Glaspell and Lawrence Langner among its members. In 1915 she and Langner and others founded the Washington Square Players, a troupe that did not hesitate to satirize contemporary issues or figures.
     In 1918 she helped found the Theatre Guild, an organization she served until 1941. A direct, honest, and often outspoken woman, she was unswerving in her quest for perfection. Neither the size nor showiness of a role was important to her; whether or not it was a good theatre was her main concern.
She took mainly supporting roles while with the Theatre Guild including Mrs. Higgins in Pygmalion, Lady Britomart in Major Barbara and Mrs. Evans in O'Neill's Strange Interlude.
     At the age of 59 she started an eight-year screen career which saw her in character roles in nearly thirty films. Of medium height, she could appear as either fat and frumpy or large and imposing. Her screen personality ran between tart but warm-hearted on one end of the spectrum to shrewish on the other. If you watch old films of the 30s on TCM you will see her in The House of Rothschild (1934); Anne of Green Gables (1934)  two Irene Dunne classics, Roberta (1935) and Showboat (1936) in which she may have had her best screen role as the asp-tongued but loving Parthy Hawks;  Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938); and Aunt Miranda in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm starring Shirley Temple.
    Lawrence Langner remembered Helen Westley as "one of the most refreshing personalities in the theatre, as well as one of its most talented character actresses." But what made her invaluable to the Washington Square Players and later to the Theater Guild, was her simple, direct enthusiasm for the greatest plays, her incisive mind which cut through meretricious work like a surgeon's scalpel, her disregard for appearances, her dislike of mediocrity, and her unwillingness to sacrifice art for money...
Sources: The Magic Curtain by Lawrence Langner. 1951
Notable Women in the American Theatre, A biographical Dictionary. 1989

Before she became Helen Westley, she billed herself as Helen Ransom and joined the touring stock company of Rose Stahl, making her New York debut in The Captain of Nonsuch (1897).