LEST WE FORGET MINNIE MADDERN FISKE

(December 19, 1865 - Feb. 15, 1932)

For her, Henrik Ibsen was an inspiration, because she found in his plays that life-sized work that "other players tell us they have found in Shakespeare."

Her father, Thomas W. Davey and her mother Elizabeth (Lizzy) Maddern Davey were entertainers.  Although she was christened Marie Augusta Davey, she appeared on stage as Minnie Maddern. At the age of three, she was singing and dancing during act intervals for the touring company her father managed and her mother performed in. 

Her formal acting debut occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas when another visiting touring company cast her as the Duke of York in Shakespeare's Richard lll.

In a speech she gave at a dinner in her honor in 1920,  she reminisced about her days as a child actor.

"I came upon the scene in what might be called the Twilight of the Palmy Days and my recollection of that period of apprenticeship is still vivid.  The stage child, then, as in my case, was often reared in a strictly religious atmosphere.  On Sunday night our mothers might be dancing in tarlatan skirts at the theatre, but on Sunday morning we were obliged to speak in hushed tones, wear starched skirts, listen to the reading of the Bible and if we sang, confine our repertory to hymns.

               "When I was twelve I had a huge repertory of widely contrasting parts that I might be called upon to play with little notice. 

          Sometime I would be cast for the Widow Melnotte in The Lady of Lyons and the next night Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin or I might be expected to play Little Mary Morgan in Ten Nights in a Barroom and sing "Father, Dear father, Come Home With Me Now"...

            "During that time it was my privilege to play children's parts with many of the illustrious

 actors of the period---the robust Barry Sullivan, the dynamic Lucille Western, the beautiful

Mary Anderson...Edwin Booth with his burning eyes and irresistible genius, Helena Modjeska, the essence of grace and charm..."

                                               As an adult actor, she debuted on May 15, 1882 at the age of sixteen in Fogg's Ferry, a comedy-melodrama by Charles E. Callahan.  The New York papers heralded her

Mrs. Fiske as Becky Sharp

performance, the Sun making a prophecy that she would more than fulfill:

"She has a native gift and disposition to her calling that will not be denied expression and which, if afforded any occasion of growth and development, cannot fail to make her a thoroughly popular artist in her line of small comedy.  She made a better impression than has been  made by any debutante in years."

    During the run of Fogg's Ferry, she married Legrand White, an accomplished musician who had joined the play's orchestra in order to woo her.  They commissioned Howard Taylor to write her next play

Caprice. It was the first of a number of plays to be written for her, and it gave early evidence of the support she would give new playwrights. In Caprice she sang "In the Gloaming," a song that became a popular ballad for decades.  However the play's run hardly outlasted their marriage which ended in divorce on June 25, 1888.  Within two years, on March 18, 1890, she married Harrison Grey Fiske, editor of the New York Dramatic Mirror. He eventually became her manager.

                                               Immediately after the wedding, Mrs. Fiske left the stage for almost four

Harrison Grey Fiske

years and began writing one-act plays including The Rose, 

The Eyes of the Heart and A Light from Saint Agnes. Upon her return to the stage her playwriting skills proved useful in doctoring scripts written for her.

        It was in 1894 that she appeared as Nora Helmer in Ibsen's 

A Doll's House in a single benefit performance at the Empire Theatre in New York. She championed the playwright's work in New York and on the road throughout the rest of her career both as actress and co-producer with hr husband.  Other roles were Hedda in Hedda Gabler, Rebecca West in Rosmersholm, Lona in Pillars of Society and Mrs. Alving in Ghosts.

      After A Doll's House, her next major triumph was as Tess in

Lorimer Stoddard's adaptation of Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles,

a critical and popular success.

     Between 1897 and 1909 Harrison and Mrs. Fiske opposed the monopolistic Theatre Syndicate so that on her tours she performed in many inferior theatres and on improvised stages.  To combat the syndicate they leased the Manhattan Theatre in 1901, mounting productions known for their ensemble playing and their rejection of the star system.

    Mrs. Fiske felt that the star system encouraged the successful actor to be surrounded by inferior actors and that it had to be  "calmly and firmly wiped out."  The company continued until 1914.  As a director she strove for ensemble playing, noting that a production should possess a "perfect harmony...one on a par with the performance of a well-balanced orchestra."

     She prodded actors to search out honest projections of their emotions and cautioned them not to rush their execution.  Her attention to detail in rehearsal impressed an eyewitness to write,"Nothing is too small for the eye and attention of Mrs. Fiske--whether it be the gesture of an actor, a detail in the stage setting or lighting, a tone of voice, or a strain of music---and it is her watchful care and artistic sense that have made her company a model one to see."

Salvation Nell

By 1906 the Fiskes had given up their lease of the Manhattan Theatre, since David Belasco and the Shubert Brothers, both now in opposition to the syndicate, provided the Fiskes with good New York theatres for their company and productions. 

     In 1909 the syndicate offered the Fiskes the use of any syndicate theatre on independent terms. At that time Mrs. Fiske was on tour in Edward Sheldon's Salvation Nell, which she had directed and in which she played the title role.  The highly successful production, written by Sheldon while he was a member of George Pierce Baker's Workshop at Harvard, illustrates her continuing support of new American playwrights.

     She made theatrical successes in Mrs. Bumpstead--Leigh by Harry James Smith in 1911; The High Road by Sheldon in 1912; Mis' Nelly of N'Orleans by Laurence Eyre in 1919. 

She did some silent films from her roles in successful plays in order to bring some financial solvency due to the financial drain from their struggle with the syndicate.  In 1911 Fiske was forced to sell the Dramatic Mirror, and in 1914 he declared bankruptcy.  By this time their marriage had become a "business partnership with mutual affection."

Her last years on the stage were spent touring revivals of her previous hits in renowned classics such as Sheridan's The Rivals, Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado About Nothing. 

    During her last decade, she received several honors: the League of Women Voters 1923 Award as one of the twelve greatest living American women, an honorary degree from Smith College in 1926 for being "the foremost living actress," an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1927 for her services to the American stage, and the Good Housekeeping Award in 1931 as one of the twelve greatest living women.

      Her acting career lasted more than six decades.  She was heralded by her friend and critic Alexander Woollcott as "the loftiest artist on the American stage."  The theatre historian Garff B. Wilson noted that "before the theories of the Moscow Art Theatre gained currency in America, Minnie Maddern Fiske was teaching similar principles and applying them to productions."

     In her views  on "The Science of Acting",  she defined great acting as "a thing of the spirit, in its best estate a conveyance of certain abstract spiritual qualities, with the person of the actor as a medium.  The eternal and immeasurable accident of the theatre which you call genius, that is a matter of the soul. But with every genius I have seen---Janauschek, Duse, Irving, Terry---there was always the last word in technical proficiency.  The inborn, mysterious something in these players can only inspire. 

No school can make a Duse.  But with such genius as hers has always gone a supreme mastery of the science of acting, a precision of performance so satisfying that it continually renews our hope and belief that acting can be taught.

     "I have always been successful in teaching others to act. The young actors are pitched into the sea, poor children, and told to sink or swim.  But how many potential Edwin Booths go to the bottom, unchronicled and unsung? Though I suppose that a real Booth would somehow make his way. Of course he would."

She spent most of her life fighting the inhuman killing of the egrets for feathers and animals for furs.  Once Alexander Woollcott asked her what she would do with five million dollars if it were given to her.        She replied: "I should give a million to certain humanitarian causes. I should turn over a million to Evangeline Booth to spend among the poor she understands so well. I should turn over a million to Lenore Cawker of Milwaukee, who has taken the city's pound on her own shoulders, paying for almost all of it out of her own pocket and working from six in the morning until midnight. Of course I could easily spend the other two million in one afternoon helping to make women see that one of the most dreadful, shocking, disheartening sights in the world is just the sight of a woman wearing furs."

REFERENCE: Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989 ed.   Morris U. Burns

Binns, Archie (in collaboration with Olive Kooken) Mrs. Fiske and the American Theatre. 1955

Arliss, George, Up the Years from Bloomsbury. 1927

Woollcott, Alexander.   Mrs. Fiske, Her Views on the Stage. 1917