A BIRTHDAY FOR BLANCHE YURKA
(June 19, 1887 - June 6, 1974)

She could sing a Puccini aria standing on her head!

 Her parents used their modest income to provide Blanche with singing lessons in New York, before she entered high school. She won a scholarship at age 15 to study voice and ballet at the Metropolitan Opera School. She sang minor roles at the Met but was dismissed from the school when she injured her voice singing the role of Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore.  She then transferred to the Institute for Musical Art, forerunner of the Juilliard School, but was dismissed for the same reason.

Broadway beckoned.  She managed to get an audition with theater impresario David Belasco. According to her autobiography, Dear Audience, he said to her: "Your diction is clear and pure. Your voice has a good timbre. I can sense that you have temperament. We must find out if you can act." In 1906 he cast her in a bit part in The Rose of the Rancho and the following year, he extended her a contract.

Between 1907 and 1917 she was featured in The Warrens of Virginia.  And while appearing in
Is Matrimony a Failure? at the Belasco Theatre in 1909 she met Jane Cowl who was starring in the play. Other plays included The House of Bondage (1914), Our American Cousin (1915) and a pair of plays by Jane Cowl:  Daybreak  and Information Please.

The game changer came in the year 1922-1923 when she was Queen Gertrude to John Barrymore's acclaimed Hamlet at the Sam Harris Theater and Manhattan Opera House, where it ran for a combined 125 performances. Barrymore was 35; Blanche was 42 and she tried to make herself appear as youthful as possible.

She also starred in a quartet of Ibsen's plays, directing three of them: The Wild Duck as Gina Ekdal, Hedda Gabler, the title role and The Vikings as Hjordis. She also had the title role in
The Lady From the Sea.
     In 1932 she played the title role in Sophocles' Electra, was Helen of Troy in Shakespeare's
Troilus and Cressida, directed Carry Nation starring Esther Dale and featuring Mildred Natwick and James Stewart in their Broadway debuts.    She won critical acclaim in 1935 when she replaced Dame Edith Evans as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet opposite Katharine Cornell's Juliet.

She co-wrote a Spanish-themed comedy, Spring in Autumn (1933) which reunited her with Esther Dale, Natwick and Stewart and featured Ms. Yurka singing a Puccini aria while standing on her head.

MADAME DEFARGE IN A TALE OF TWO CITIES STARRING RONALD COLMAN
When she finally made her screen debut at the age of 47, it was the role that many consider the greatest of her film career--the venomous, vindictive revolutionary Madame Therese Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities.  Alla Nazimova had turned it down and recommended Yurka, declaring her the "only" actress for the part.  They hadn't met, but were acquainted with each other's work, both considered to be the leading Ibsen heroines on the Broadway stage.  In spite of Nazimova's endorsement, she was the 67th actor tested for the role.  She threw herself into the part. Her final fight scene with Edna May Oliver showed the two actresses tumbling over tables and over the floor, offering a hit of Yurka's onstage physicality.   Her character portrayal became a model of a sinister screen villain.

Other films on her resume were:  The Song of Bernadette as Jennifer Jones' aunt,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey as the Abbess of the San Luis Rey chapel, Mama Tucker in
The Southerner (1945), directed by Jean Renoir.

Blanche Yurka was active in theater causes all her life. She supported the 1919 Actors' Strike. She later vigorously defended the interests of American actors against a British invasion of American theaters.
She aligned herself with Tallulah Bankhead's defense of the Federal Theater Project at the 1939
Senate Appropriations Committee hearings that de-funded the program in reaction to productions that were deemed sympathetic to the political left-wing.

She collected her thoughts about acting technique in the book Dear Audience (1959) and wrote a memoir, Bohemian Girl (1970).  She was a popular guest at women's clubs and colleges, where she continued to perform dramatic readings.