LEST WE FORGET SHIRLEY BOOTH
(August 30, 1898 - October 16, 1992)

"She has perfect timing and perfect reading, and she always has complete control of herself, her part and her audience. I have often gone back to watch her a second and a third time, trying to figure out how she does it, because the first time she has made it seem so effortless that I have forgotten I'm watching an actress."
       Helen Hayes, one of Ms. Booth's most faithful fans



Best known for her stage roles in Come Back, Little Sheba and
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she was born Thelma Booth Ford in Manhattan's Morningside Heights.  Though her family background was hardly theatrical, she seems to have made her first public appearance by reciting a short poem at the age of three.   From childhood her only ambition was to be an actress.  When she was twelve she left school and began acting with a Hartford, Connecticut stock company in Mother Carey's Chickens. Two years later she moved to New York and landed a job as the ingenue with the Poli Stock Company.  Since her father had forbade her to use his name, Thelma Booth Ford became Shirley Booth; "Shirley" was from a character she had played; "Booth" from her middle name.

In 1925 she made her Broadway debut opposite Humphrey Bogart in Hell's Bells. After the play closed, she returned to stock and followed the same pattern for a decade. In New York she was usually cast in minor roles, while she often had leading roles in stock.  About her stock experience she commented,"I could have hung around New York and taken my chances, but I had to go where people believed in me, and I had to keep acting so I could believe in myself."

Producer George Abbott cast her as Mabel, the warmhearted gangster's moll,  in Three Men on a Horse in 1935, which was her first substantial part on Broadway. After a brief sojourn in Hollywood with her first husband, she returned to New York and appeared in Philip Barry's Philadelphia Story which won her as much critical praise as Katharine Hepburn.  From 1940-1942 she co-starred in
My Sister Eileen. After acting in a wide variety of Broadway shows she won the Tony Award for her work in Fay Kanin's Goodbye, My Fancy (1948). But it was as Lola Delaney in William Inge's play
Come Back, Little Sheba that she was proclaimed a star. Awards for the role included another Tony for best actress, the Billboard Award, the Barter Theatre Award, and the New York Critics Circle Award.

       She then moved from domestic tragedy to a zany musical comedy as fun loving Cissy in
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. After a substantial run Paramount Studios invited her to star in the film version of Come Back, Little Sheba. The film was shot in a single month.  She won the Oscar for best actress in a film and the Cannes International Film Festival Award for the world's best actress of 1952.
As the lonely spinster in Arthur Laurents's The Time of the Cuckoo she received another Tony Award.

After a few more rather forgettable films, Screen Gems Television signed her to a five-year contract to play Hazel, the housemaid on a weekly show.  Defending her decision, she insisted, "I think you should do what you believe in and not worry about whether people are going to like it or not. . .I knew I'd be criticized."
She also maintained that there were few good roles for women in the plays being written.  She was launched in another medium and once again triumphed.  For her performance of Hazel she received twenty-eight awards including three Emmys for best continuing performance by an actress in a series.

After the Hazel series ended, she won another Emmy as Amanda Wingfield in a television adaptation of The Glass Menagerie.

Shirley Booth believed that 'an actress is doing a poor job if the audience sits out there and thinks, "Boy, I'm watching some acting'. Audiences should feel somebody left a door open by mistake, and happened to stroll in when something interesting was going on. They should be so free of the feeling they're watching actors that they expect someone to say any minute, 'Hey, get out of here, this is personal'."

Some of the hardest-to-please NY critics commended her acting.
Richard Watts, New York Post, "It is not exactly a secret these days that Miss Booth is one of the wonders of the American stage, a superb actress, a magnificent comedienne and an all-around performer of seemingly endless versatility."


Resource:  Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989.  Katherine Laris