HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MRS. LESLIE CARTER
(June 10, 1857 - November 13, 1937)

She was called "The American Sarah Bernhardt".

Born Caroline Dudley in Lexington, Kentucky, her wealthy parents gave her every advantage money could buy. She aspired to the stage from childhood, but her family kept her from appearing publicly, even in amateur entertainments.

At the time of her marriage in 1880 to Leslie Carter, a lawyer and Chicago millionaire,whose fortune stemmed from Carter's Little Liver Pills, she was described as a flame-haired belle who was strikingly beautiful with great vivacity.

Allen Churchill in his well-researched book entitled The Great White Way, A Re-creation of Broadway's Golden Era of Theatrical Entertainment,  gives a well-documented  account of Mrs. Carter and her mentor David Belasco.
     "According to her husband, she took a series of lovers, one of them the dashing matinee-idol actor Kyrle Bellew.  Leslie Carter sued for divorce; his wife countered.  The New York Times branded the resulting trial "The most indecent and revolting ever heard in a Chicago court." After Carter won, Mrs. Carter found herself alone in a hostile world with no one but her mother at her side.  She decided that her next step should be the stage.  She sought out David Belasco, asking him to teach her to act. Belasco was unsure of the prospects of a woman who was both notorious and theatrically inexperienced, for he firmly believed that only those who dreamed of the theatre from childhood could succeed at it.    Mrs. Carter did little to allay such doubts.  Asked if she desired to enact comedy or tragedy, she responded, "I am a horsewoman and I should like to make my first entrance on horseback, jumping a high fence."

      "Belasco politely ushered her out, but she returned. Now she fell to her knees to vow, "If being hurt by people can make me act, I can act."  Belasco became her mentor.  If she anticipated a pleasant period of guidance, she was much mistaken. Belasco proved to be the harshest of taskmasters.  "Mrs. Carter was an amateur and very crude," he recalled later. "She was full of mannerisms, a society woman without any knowledge whatsoever of the stage. I first taught her how to walk. . . showing her for hours how to enter a room."

     "He next discovered that, like many beginners, she was afraid of the sound of her own voice. He drilled her endlessly in the rendition of dramatic poems, together with one-act plays like The Conjugal Lesson. Four times daily he paused portentously to hear her recite the Second Players's Speech from Hamlet, the six lines of which he considered a particular test of diction.   Gradually he became more specific, training her in scenes from well-known plays. Here he used absolute realism. Rehearsing Mrs. Carter in a scene from Oliver Twist, he "dragged her around by the hair, just as Bill Sykes dragged Nancy. I would hit her head on the floor and haul her around until she reached the proper pitch and could express just what she felt."

    "Finally she appeared ready. The first production in which Belasco starred her was
The Ugly Duckling. "As outstanding as a lighthouse, but less subtle," one critic said of her performance. Others however thought her promising and all admired the glowing fire-red hair which when set free ( this happened at least once in all her plays) tumbled down to her knees.

"She seemed able to dominate a stage. Belasco wrote The Heart of Maryland for her.  The handsome hero was played by Maurice Barrymore, who offstage was the father of three growing youngsters: Lionel, Ethel and John. At the climax of The Heart of Maryland, Mrs. Carter mounted to the top of a forty-foot bell tower, and, grasping the clapper of the bell, swung back and forth against a Civil War landscape.  With the bell thus silenced, Barrymore as a Northern soldier unjustly accused of spying, was able to escape.  The Heart of Maryland was Belasco's first hit as a producer and a personal triumph for Mrs. Carter.

"In 1900 The Heart of Maryland had been presented in England, where critic George Bernard Shaw disliked the play but approved Mrs. Carter's skills.

"Her next great role was in Zaza playing a Parisian courtesan who finds redemption with her lover's clear-eyed child. It was a sinful play for the times, adding spice to the gossip that Mrs. Carter was Belasco's mistress.   While that possibility did exist, Mrs. Carter  lived with her mother in the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Madison Square and on occasion Belasco could be seen escorting her home." (End, excerpt)

Carter became her generation's greatest dramatic actress. When she broke with Belasco in 1906 after her surprise remarriage, she was already considered a relic and abandoned Broadway in favor of vaudeville.

Her last stage hit was as an aging coquette in
Somerset Maugham's drawing-room comedy,
The Circle, in 1921.