EDWIN BOOTH AT 19

The year was 1852, a young rising star, the son of the great Junius Brutus Booth, was in financial straits.  Most of the money earned from touring had been squandered by his father's self-indulgence and addictions.

However, there was an inner strength and instinct for survival in the rugged mining towns of Northern California that only fueled the young man's passion for succeeding on the stage--the only occupation he knew anything about, the one true love in his lonely life.


Eleanor Ruggles wrote a well-researched narrative about him entitled The Prince of Players and this excerpt defines how that phrase applied to him and to the miners for whom he performed.

Excerpt from  Prince of Players Edwin Booth by Eleanor Ruggles

Norton,  New York. 1953  pp. 57-60

SEEING THE ELEPHANT

Miners and travel obstacles in the 19^th century

         California had an expression: “Seeing the elephant.” It had been the  title of a skit satirizing the gold rush that had run in San Francisco for months. “To see the elephant” meant to trek hopefully to the gold country and be (what most people were) viciously disappointed.  The West took up the ironic idiom.   All rugged travel, hunger and heartbreaking bad luck were “seeing the elephant.”  Miners had elephants stamped on their letter paper and daubed them in red and black on their cabin walls.

         The Booths had caught a glimpse of the elephant in Sacramento. Now Edwin got a good look from trunk to tail.  At first his his father (Junius Brutus Booth) had left, he lingered on with Junius (his older brother) and Harriet in their house on Telegraph Hill, an exasperating guest.  Having no work, he spent his time drinking in saloons where the bars were still warm from his father’s instep. His nineteenth birthday (November 13, 1852) came and went. Junius was mightily relieved when Willmarth Waller, an actor-manager organizing a company to play the mining towns engaged Ted for the tour. “The name will help me anyway,” said Waller.

         Junius had learned a thing or two about how to survive in California. It was the survival of the cautious. His brother was a brash kid, and Junius advised him before starting out to “put a slug” which was a piece of gold worth fifty dollars, “in the bottom of your trunk, forget you have it, and when things are at their worst bring out your slug.”

                  At Sacramento they all changed steamers and churned up the Feather River to Marysville.  Then, piling into a coach, they jolted for miles across plains whose horizons were ringed at night by the red pillars of campfires. They inched in silence, muffling all harness noise, through bandit country where mustachioed highwaymen like Joaquin Murietta could be expected to take shape silently out of the brush.  Now and then a grizzly lumbered across the trail.  Through the night the coyotes howled. The sturdy horses braced their hoofs as they picked their way down pebbly forest paths. From the hillttops the swaying, singing coachload glimpsed an occasional white tent roof or a thread of smoke showing the whereabouts of some lonely fortune hunter.

         Some of the mining towns had real playhouses with a sign over the door announcing THEATER or DRAMATIC HALL in five-foot letters, and inside kerosene footlights and drop curtains with pictures of elephants or of a miner recumbent, his pick by his side, dreaming of home. But often traveling actors played in a calico-draped saloon on a stage of boards help up by sawhorses, or in somebody’s barn or warehouse where the all-male audience planted stools on the dirt floor and belligerently staked off places like claims.

         Waller’s troupe stopped first in Nevada City, a clump of shacks in a clearing among the tall pines, and Edwin acted his first Iago.  They played next in Grass Valley, then in Rough and Ready, then in distant Downieville on the North Yuba at the deep bottom of a valley high in the mountains. The more remote the camp, the more electric the tension in the audience of tough-looking miners who sat with their guns handy in their laps. If you could capture them they showered you with gold pieces; if you disappointed them they tossed you in a blanket. Many of them knew the classical texts by heart and yowled with irritation when the smallest cut was made.

         The actors were in Downieville when a tremendous blizzard struck. Waller herded them back along the trail as far as Grass Valley. Here the snow lay twelve feet deep in places, and food was so short and fantastically expensive that Edwin’s precious slug, fetched out of his trunk to meet the emergency, bought the company no more than one dinner. They forced themsleves out and on again to Nevada City, hoping to earn enough there to pay for the steamer trip home. But when they reached town on an icy December night they found the dramatic hall dark.

         For many days neither food not letters had got through to the camps. The stranded miners had no money for theaters.  The stranded actors huddled around the stove in the dismal hotel and began to swap stories out of their accumulated experience of their catastrophes.

         Edwin flung away and wandered off alone down the main street, which led out of the camp into a no man’s land pitted like a moon landscape with gulches left by the gold diggers.  The snow made the night look almost bright and the raw holes sculptured. He was on his way back when he saw a lantern bobbing, heard shouts and running footsteps.

         “Holla!” rang George Spear’s (a member of the company) voice, sounding half-frozen, “Ted, is that you?”

         “Yes, what’s up?”

         “There’s mail just in and a message for you.”

         “What news?”

         “Not good news for you, my boy.”

         Edwin, like his father, occasionally had premonitions, true guesses at dark events. “Spear,” he asked instantly, “is my father dead?” Spear nodded slowly.

LEST WE FORGET DOROTHY STICKNEY
"A Lady of the Theatre"
(June 21, 1896 - June 2, 1998)

Widow of playwright Howard Lindsay after 41 years of marriage, they co-starred as Clarence and Vinnie Day during the long run of Life With Father, the longest-running non-musical Broadway play in history (1939 - 1947).

The play was turned down by the Lunts and many other stars. It was tried out in summer stock at the Lakewood Theater in Skowhegan, Maine with Mr. Lindsay and Miss Stickney thrust into the leading roles.  She said: "We weren't at all sure we were good enough for the parts. We had never originally intended to play them ourselves." Success in summer stock eventually led to Broadway, and opening night was filled with minor disasters. In the first scene the actress playing the maid accidentally dropped a tray of dishes, and, later, several actors forgot their lines.  The Lindsays went home and cried.      "Little did we realize that the play would last through World War II."

A WISE AND PATIENT MOTHER
   Her portrayal of the mother was at the heart of the play. She was understanding without being overly sentimental.  Brooks Atkinson said her portrait was "brilliant acting, both sweet and witty, with a supple response to the storminess of her domestic economy."

Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney in Life With Father

OVERCOMING STAGE FRIGHT

In her 1979 memoir Openings and Closings, she wrote about her lifelong battle with stage fright. She said she had learned one lesson: "When panic overtook me and I felt absolutely unable to go on, I would tell myself, 'You don't have to do the whole play--you don't even have to play the next scene--all you have to do is say the next line."  Although she never fully conquered that fear, she was always able to say the next line and the next line, and in so doing found a lifetime of accomplishment in the theater.

EARLY CAREER CHALLENGES

After a one-line performance as a Folies Bergere girl in Toto which starred the great European star Leo Dictrichstein, she returned to New York.    She lived in a "rickety West Side rooming house" with another aspiring actress who was so tiny she could play child parts.
     "We wore out our shoes making the rounds of the offices every day. On summer nights when our bedroom was too stiflingly hot for sleeping, we would get seats in the open air on the top of a beautiful double-decker Fifth Avenue bus, and for ten cents each, we would ride all night and get a small breeze.
     About three in the morning, when it got a little cooler, we would go back to our room and stretch out in the lumpy bed until it was time to get up and start looking for jobs again. We were hopelessly stagestruck.  We pounded the pavements, and haunted managers' and agents' offices only to be turned away with a shake of the head, when we had barely gotten inside the door, or with 'Nothing today,' or worst of all, with a "You're not the type." Life was a combination of hope and despair.
     For three years I tried to see the producer Edgar Selwyn and never got further than his office boy. One day while waiting endlessly, hoping for a few words from the great man, I whiled away the time and vented my anger by writing some verses."

YOU'RE NOT THE TYPE by Dorothy Stickney  (reprinted in her Memoir)
                 
                   I looked for work in early fall
                  And could not find a part at all.
                  I looked and looked and looked and then
                  I looked and looked and looked again,
                  And looked and looked and now it's spring,
                  And still I haven't anything.
                  Too fat, too thin, too short, too tall,
                  Too blond, too dark, too large, too small.

                  An office boy my dream would thwart,
                 "You're not the type," I'd hear him snort,
                  So then I asked a big producer
                  "Oh, let me play a part for you, sir!"
                  And as my eye he saw me wipe,
                  He yawned and said, "You're not the type."
                  A playwright next I interviewed,
                  My heart with brightest hopes imbued.

                 He turned away and lit his pipe,
                 And shortly said, "You're not the type."
                 To see an agent then I went,
                  My shoes worn out, my money spent.
                 The agent smiled and said, "My dear,
                 You're not the type. Come in next year,
                 For doubtless then we'll be engaging."
                 And I departed madly raging.

                So here within my furnished room,
                At least I face my awful doom.
               I'll starve and go (I hope) above,
               And this is what I'm thinking of--
               Perhaps if I am very good
               And play my harp as angels should,
               Saint Peter will be kind to me
               And lend me once his Golden Key.

              I hope to see upon the stair
              Imploring for admittance there,
              Producers, playwrights, agents, too,
              And all the deadly office crew.
              When my familiar face they see
              They'll say, "Don't you remember me?"
              Then from the Pearly Gates I'll pipe,
              "Oh, go to Hell! You're not the type!"


REFERENCES
Openings and Closings. Dorothy Stickney. Doubleday and Company NY 1979
Wikipedia
NY Times Obituary
Bismarck Tribune Obiturary
IBDB and IMDB


           

 

LEST WE FORGET MARY ANDERSON
(July 28, 1859-May, 29, 1940)

In the early 1860s  her family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where her father enlisted in the Confederate States Army in the Civil War. He was killed in action at Mobile when she was three. She was educated by the nuns at the Ursuline convent and the all-girl Presentation Academy.

When she was twelve, her stepfather introduced her to the works of Shakespeare, an event which helped to shape her later career. Lessons in English literature and elocution were begun with Professor Noble Butler of Louisville, and progress was rewarded with tickets to the Saturday matinees at the Louisville Theatre.  Her early theatre-going adventures are chronicled in her autobiography A Few Memories published in 1896.  In her own words she discusses her love affair with the theatre and when she decided to pursue a stage career.

THE FIRST PLAY I ever saw was Richard the Third with Edwin Adams as the crook-backed tyrant.
     Young, graceful, handsome, an ideal actor in romantic characters, he was hardly fitted for so sombre and tragic a part. Yet the force of his personal magnetism stamped his every word, look, and gesture indelibly upon my memory.  The music and lights; the actors and actresses, whose painted faces seemed far more perfect to me then (I was 12 years old) than anything in nature; luckless Anne; Henry the Sixth, who, though he is an interloper in the play, makes, through Cibber's daring, a splendidly effective acting scene; the royal army, consisting of six "scrawny" knock-kneed supers, with a very unmilitary look about them----all are as clear before me now as though I had seen them yesterday.

HOW WE ALWAYS REMEMBER the first dip into a new sensation after impressions of things a hundredfold greater are blotted from our minds!  My mother, seeing my delight in the play, promised that, if we deserved it, my brother and I should occasionally attend the weekly matinees. With such a reward as two theatre tickets in view, my amount of good conduct was cheap in payment.  I became less mischievous and forgetful.

WHEN THE LONGED-FOR SATURDAY CAME, little Joe and I would start for the old
Louisville Theatre, then on the corner of Fourth and Green Streets, quite two hours before the doors were opened.  The man in the lobby, observing my singular keenness, soon allowed us, early as it was, to enter; though he was compelled to lock the door after us.
     We would then sit alone in the large, dimly lighted theatre, feeling the most privileged of mortals, silently watching the great green curtain, and imagining all the enchantments it concealed.  After an hour of such amusement, mysterious feet, generally in shabby boots and shoes, were seen under the curtain.  Then the doors opened, people began to drop in. There was a rustle of programmes and banging of seats.  Suddenly the footlights flared against the green curtain, under which mysterious feet were seen again, this time in dainty satin slippers or shoes--so many feet, so differently shod, yet all meeting on one common ground before the peep-hole in the curtain.
     Then the orchestra, full of noise, especially at the furioso finale, after which the tinkling bell, and, to the traditional pizzicato (if the villain commenced the play) or the sweet tremolo of violins (if the angelic maiden began), the curtain slowly rose.
     From that moment we became oblivious of everything but the scene before us, and only after the curtain fell upon the last act was our dream broken, when, with a shock, we found ourselves once more in the cold and dusky streets.  To leave the Temple of Enchantment and come back to commonplace realities was our daily sadness.  Fairy plays, melodramas and minstrel shows formed our regular menu.

AN ANNOUNCEMENT that Edwin Booth was to visit Louisville filled its playgoers with delightful anticipations. Times were hard, we were poor, and many sacrifices had to be made to enable us to witness a few of his performances.
   RICHLIEU was the first of the series. What a revelation it was! I had never seen any great acting before, and it proved a turning point in my life.  The subtle cunning with which the artist invested the earlier parts of the play was as irresistible as the power, fire and pathos of the later scenes were terrible and electrifying. It was impossible to think of him as an actor.  He was Richlieu. I felt for the first time that acting was not merely a delightful amusement, but a serious art that might be used for high ends.
    AFTER that brilliant performance sleep was impossible. On returning home I sat at the window of my little room until morning. The night passed like an hour. Before the dawn I had mapped out a stage career for myself.

I was fourteen years of age, inexperienced and uneducated, but I had not a moment of doubt or fear.

RESOURCE:   Anderson, Mary. A Few Memories. 1896

LEST WE FORGET BILLIE BURKE
(August 7, 1884 - May 14, 1970)
aka Mrs. Florenz Ziegfeld and the original Glinda in
The Wizard of Oz.

In the Introduction to her autobiography With Powder on My Nose, she wrote:
"Billie Burke is my real name, not a stage name. I was named for my father, Billie Burke, who was a singing clown with Barnum & Bailey and in Europe many years ago. I was formally baptized 'Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke' in Westminster Abbey, London, a name immediately ignored by everybody. Since I started on the stage in England some people believe I am English. I'm thoroughly American, born in Washington, D.C. My mother's family was from New Orleans and my father's from Ireland."

While she is primarily known today by the billions of people who have seen the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, many don't remember that she starred in twenty-one plays on Broadway, including roles in her husband's Ziegfeld Follies, and that there were sixteen silent films between 1916 and 1921 and sixty-three talking pictures in her lengthy career.  As a TCM junkie, I can never see her enough in the Topper series, Dinner at Eight, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Father of the Bride and The Young Philadelphians (in which she "stole the show").    Her voice was unique in intonation, which she accentuated in character roles as dim-witted, spoiled, society types.  No one can imitate that sound.
        Her beauty and taste made her a major trendsetter throughout the 1910s and 20s. Much of her wardrobe, on screen and off, at this time was provided by the leading European couturier Lucile (in private life Lady Duff Gordon), whose New York branch was the fashion mecca for socialites and entertainment celebrities.

CAMERON SHIPP'S TAKE ON MS. BURKE

Cameron Shipp co-authored Billie Burke's second autobiography entitled With Powder On My Nose, published in 1959. In the last chapter, "How To Write a Book with Billie Burke" he gives a very humorous, witty and insightful account of his subject. The following is an excerpted part of that chapter.

"On Wednesday night, January 28, 1959, after the curtain had fallen on the last act of Listen to the Mocking Bird by Edward Chodorov, the Shubert Theatre in Washington, D.C. caught fire and was destroyed.  Miss Billie Burke, Miss Eva Le Gallienne and Miss Una Merkel, stars of the play were safely in their hotel rooms when the blaze started. If they had been on stage or in their dressing room, which were two flights up and reached by narrow iron stairways, they would almost certainly have burned to death. The ladies thanked Providential timing for saving them, but the fire in the theatre was a professional disaster. Sets and scenery were a total loss and Listen to the Mocking Bird was not able to reopen.
       Miss Burke was particularly distressed.  There had been good hope that the play would reach Broadway, where she had not appeared since 1944, in Mrs. January and Mr. X by her friend the late Zoe Akins. She was eager to return to the street of many triumphs after years of work in Hollywood. And in Listen to the Mocking Bird, which was a drama, she thought that she might at long last demonstrate that she could portray a character much deeper than those she once described as the "twitter-pated, bird-witted ladies" she had been compelled to play in the movies.
          Her Broadway plays, although they were all comedies, were highly sophisticated plays, much superior to her Hollywood material. Her range was wide, but Hollywood stuck to a salable commodity in her nonsense parts and gave her nothing else to do.

WITH POWDER ON MY NOSE AS THE CO-AUTHOR
            During her hiatus from film work, she found time to work on With Powder On My Nose. She had been preparing for ten years, writing notes in pencil on yellow scratch pads and essays in green ink on embossed letterhead.   She also had, she said, a good many thousand words about love, a subject which she approves mightily, but most of these had become scattered between her sitting room, her drawing room, and her kitchen.
            Her favorite method of communication is not note-making. She prefers Western Union above all else and next to that the telephone. Any friend of hers is likely to get two or three long telegrams a day from her, not necessarily containing news. Undoubtedly she acquired the telegram habit from (her late husband) Florenz Ziegfeld, who used to send dozens a day, often to people in his own theatre, only a few feet from him.
            She keeps a bulging and battered leather notebook overflowing with names and addresses of friends and calls them no matter where they are. She is at her warm and funny best by long distance.
            Like many another actor or actress who has created an image on screen, and has performed the image in public for many years, Billie Burke often reverts in private to typecasting. She has played vague, fluttering ladies in movies so long that she goes in and out of character anywhere, without difficulty.  The lady knows what she is doing at all times. She knows what non sequiturs are and thoroughly enjoys dropping them for people to trip over.
            One day she said, "I imagine some of this will be a funny book.  It will almost have to be because I want to say some things that are true, and to say them all of a sudden. If you do that you usually create an effect of shock, the truth being a rare thing. People are appalled by it and don't know what to do except to laugh." (Note to actors, this is a great timing tip).
             Miss Burke's truths were assembled in interviews, by telephone, and by having read her notes, and expand them, into a tape recorder. She tried at first to manage a recorder herself but without success. She claimed that the machine was a monster and that the tapes got loose and swirled around the room and tripped her up.  But when someone else was on hand to start and stop the recorder she was delighted.  At her first session, she talked rapidly for two hours without stopping--clearly and emphatically, like an actress on stage who knew her lines cold.  She was disappointed when evening fell and the recorder was taken away from her.  She taped thousands of more words, most of which appear in this book.  She had only one failure. Carried away one afternoon with admiration for soap, she spoke three thousand words on how to take a bath.
             Shortly after this book was completed and while Coward-McCann, Inc. was starting to put it into type, Miss Burke---now in full flight of authorship--was still searching for notes she was sure she had put somewhere. She had not, for instance, listed her favorite actresses but these were easy to remember: Katharine Cornell, whom she considers the most glamourous, the most 'theatre' of all; Helen Hayes, Ethel Barrymore, Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske, Ruth Gordon and Siobhan McKenna.
           As for actors, she stopped firmly with the name of John Drew, her leading man in her first American play, and declined to go further. "He brushed his hair so beautifully," she said.
       "And be sure," she said, "to sum it all up with this advice: "Girls, keep your shine coming from within and powder on your nose, and life will be much more fun."

END OF EXCERPT

Resource:   Wikipedia, Google images
With Powder On My Nose (already mentioned in the text)

LEST WE FORGET KIM STANLEY
(February 11, 1925 - August 13, 2001)

"Kim Stanley was often called the greatest actress of her generation, though today relatively few people know who she was."
            George Riddick, book review, Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley by Jon Krampner

She was known as "First Lady of the Actors Studio".

Her birth name was Patricia Beth Reid; she was born in Tularosa, New Mexico. Her mother was an interior decorator; her father a professor of philosophy and education at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Patricia majored in drama at the University of New Mexico and later studied at the Pasadena Playhouse where she adopted her maternal grandmother's surname as her stage name.
                     Earlier at the age of 16 she had already decided to become an actor after seeing Katharine Hepburn in a touring version of The Philadelphia Story.  "I was overcome", she said, "transfixed."After the Pasadena Playhouse she relocated to New York, joined the Actors Studio and studied the method acting under Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan.

BROADWAY DEBUT
       After appearing in an off-Broadway production of Gertrude Stein's Yes Is For A Very Young Man (1949), in which she played an older American woman (at age 24) infatuated by a young French soldier played by Anthony Franciosa (at age 21), she was cast in her first Broadway role, replacing Julie Harris in Lillian Hellman's short-lived historical play, Montserrat

FIRST BIG SUCCESS
      In 1953 she won the New York Drama Critics Award for playing the tomboy Millie Owen in William Inge's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Picnic.  The character was supposed to be 16; Kim was 28.  Due to her success in Picnic, Inge cast her as Cherie in Bus Stop, probably her finest stage portrayal.  The New York Times hailed her "glowing performance full of amusing detail--cheap, ignorant, bewildered, but also radiant with personality."  During the run she suffered nightly nerves and missed a few performances. Marital troubles with her second husband, actor Curt Conway, the father of her two children, was partly responsible.

Marilyn Monroe, who played the role in the film, studied at the Actors Studio to prepare for the role of Cherie, while Kim was known as the "First Lady of the Studio". Many believed Monroe's performance was actually based on Kim's.   She would continue to get critical acclaim in role after role on Broadway, though many of her plays were not successful, and except for Bus Stop, she rarely appeared in any play longer than two or three months, often with frequent absences in even those short runs.

In 1958, when she appeared as Sara Melody, the daughter of the drunken bar owner Con Melody played by Eric Portman in Eugene O'Neill's
A Touch of the Poet, on Broadway, for which she was highly praised, she again missed a number of performances.  She abruptly left the play altogether after blaming Portman for slapping her in one scene with what she said was "excessive zeal".
  Helen Hayes, who played her mother in the play, tried to explain Kim's behavior from observing her during rehearsal. "If we don't get something from a director, we're terrified, We think we're so bad because he doesn't know what to say to us. This is how far from conceited actors are, and I assure you that I've worked with. . .You know, Kim Stanley, with all her fighting and everything else--that's the basis of Kim's fighting. It's such a personal insecurity about herself----"Oh, how terrible I am, I can't do this." And the greater the insecurity is, the more they put on this act of bravado sometimes."   (Actors Talk About Acting, arranged and edited by Lewis Funke and John E. Booth, 1961)    Kim had divorced Conway and married actor/director Alfred Ryder, by whom she had another daughter.

       Before that marriage ended in divorce, Ryder directed her in Henry Denker's play A Far Country (1961) as a young woman afflicted by hysterical paralysis and helped by Sigmund Freud.
Note:  As a sophomore drama major at San Jose State University, I saw her in A Far Country when it came to San Francisco on tour and I was like she had been regarding seeing Katharine Hepburn--"overcome and transfixed."  I kept impersonating her voice and behavior; I wanted to do what she did. But only Kim could sustain that inner light which made her so brilliant and moving.

Three years later she appeared as Masha in the Actors Studio production of Chekhov's Three Sisters with Geraldine Page and
Shirley Knight directed by Lee Strasberg and recorded on film.  Unfortunately when the play was invited to the Aldwych Theatre in London as part of the 1965 World Theatre season, it was a disaster. The ill-prepared cast, with some late substitutes, had trouble with the raked stage, and the production was greeted with laughter. It was too much for her. She had a nervous breakdown and never stepped on stage again.

FILM AND TV

Between 1949 and 1960 she appeared in over 40 live dramas, only a handful of which have survived in kinescopes.  Among her many starring roles was Wilma, a star-struck 15-year-old girl from the U.S. Gulf Coast of Texas in Horton Foote's A Young Lady of Property, which aired on The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse in 1953.

She never considered herself a sexpot but was able through her acting skills to convey the glamour of the Monroe-type film star in The Goddess (1958) desperately seeking attention and love denied her in childhood.
               The lust for celebrity was also a theme in Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) in which she played a medium organizing a kidnapping so that she can use her powers to find a child. Subtly changing her character from moment to moment, she was nominated for an Oscar.

AWARDS
Theatre World Award for her role in The Chase (1952).  Two Tony nominations for Best Actress in a Play for Sara in A Touch of the Poet and for the lead in A Far Country.  The New York Film Critics Circle Award for  Best Actress, Oscar nomination for
Seance on a Wet Afternoon.  Second Oscar nomination for playing the mother of Frances Farmer
in Frances starring Jessica Lange (1982)
Primetime Emmy for outstanding supporting actress as Big Mama in the TV adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1985)  Inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1985.

           In Rick McKay's 2003 film Broadway: The Golden Age, Frank Langella, Elaine Stritch and other actors were interviewed describing the impact of Stanley's acting, providing an enticing prelude to a fuller discussion of her life and work.  Her reputation, her elusiveness, and the few tantalizing appearances that have survived on film and tape, have given her practically mythic status, as Jon Krampner's book Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley illustrates.  That label, "The Female Brando," may seem like a commercial attempt to compare her to the more widely known name, but as the author reveals, the comparison of Stanley to Brando was a recurrent one throughout her career. Both were Actors Studio Method actors, considered by many actors and critics to be at the top of their profession.

"Nobody can adequately describe her brilliance, for actors are sculptors who carve in snow."
       Bryan Forbes, director and writer, Seance on a Wet Afternoon

Resources
Krampner, Jon. Female Brando: the Legend of Kim Stanley, Back Stage Books (2006)
Bergan, Ronald, Obituary, The Guardian. August 24, 2001
https://www.talkinbroadway.com/bookreviews/femalebrando.html

LEST WE FORGET AIDA OVERTON WALKER
(Feb. 14, 1880 - October 11, 1914)

"The Queen of the Cakewalk" or as composer Bert Stamps called her in his ode to her--"a terrestrial 'fairy' on feet."

At an early age she gained an education and considerable musical training in New York City.  She started her career in the late 1880s as a chorus member in "Black Patti's Troubadours,"  where she met her husband, George Walker who, with his partner Bert Williams, were the major black vaudeville and musical comedy powerhouses of the era.

Around the time of her marriage to George in 1899, Williams and Walker began to concentrate on writing and performing full-length musicals rather than stand-alone songs and sketches in the vaudeville tradition.
She first gained attention in 1900, when her performance of "Miss Hannah From Savannah" in their show Sons of Ham became an instant hit. In 1903 she played a command performance at Buckingham Palace for King Edward VII, thus gaining international stardom.
           For the next ten years, she would be known for her work in musical theater as the talented trio (George, Bert and Aida) performed in successful shows such as In Dahomey (1902), Abyssinia (1906) and Bandana Land (1908).  She choreographed all of the productions as well as Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson's popular The Red Moon (1909). The era of the Williams and Walker musicals came to an end with Bandana Land, as George Walker became ill midway through the show's run in 1909 and passed away in 1911.

Aida and George Walker

The last three years of her career have been largely ignored by scholars. In The Last "darky", Louis Chude-Sokei stressed that Aida was not merely an accessory to the creative duo of Williams and Walker, but a star in her own right.

The final full-length musical of her career was the Smart Set Company's
His Honor the Barber (1911). When she joined the company, she was billed as a supporting actress alongside director and star S. H. Dudley; however the press remembered them as co-stars. Her performance was considered the highlight of the show.  Critic Sylvester Russell commented that her tour with the Smart Set Company "demonstrated that she is the dominant feature of the show and the box office draw. Without her last season, there would have been no box office attraction."  In the New York Dramatic Mirror the critic wrote: "...Miss Walker, as is well known, is the best Negro comedienne today...her impersonation of a Negro 'chappie'...is the real hit of the play.  The Chicago Defender: "All the people who ventured out to see...the Smart Set Company were drawn there to see Mrs.Walker, the most fascinating and vivacious female comedy actress the Negro race has ever produced. Her male specialty, "Thats why they call me shine" held her audiences spellbound.
 Both of the reviews mentioned her performances in male attire. Such drag numbers were her specialty--she had taken over her ill husband's role in Bandana Land and was considered to be the only person who could accurately imitate him.

In 1912 it was announced that she would perform her interpretation of the "Salome" dance at Hammerstein's Victoria Theatre. This dance, which originally premiered in Bandana Land (1908) was her response to the "Salomania" craze that swept through the white vaudeville circuit in 1907.  The nationwide fascination with all things Salome began in 1907 when the Metropolitan Opera House shut down Richard Strauss' opera Salome after a single performance.   Many white dancers, quick to capitalize on the American public's appetite for the risque, made a name for themselves through their own sexually charged adaptations of the "dance of the seven veils".

Her adaptation of the Salome dance was very different from the titillating performances of countless white actresses and indeed, from Aida's own perspective, it had to be. She was aware of the potential impact the performing arts could have on race relations, having written in a 1905 article for Colored American, "I venture to think and dare to state that our profession does more toward the alleviation of color prejudice than any other profession among colored people."
        Through her work she strove to combat the prevalent stereotype that African-American women in general, and black actresses in particular, were immoral and oversexed. "I am aware of the fact that many well-meaning people dislike stage life, especially our women," she wrote. "On that point I would say, a woman does not lose her dignity. . .when she enters stage life."

As Salome in 1912 wearing a diamond necklace
that could double as a tiara

Performing Salome as a figure that "epitomized the inherent sensuality and, according to some, perversity of women" was out of the question. She downplayed the erotic aspects of the Salome dance, beginning with the costume. A cartoon in The New York World was accompanied by the caption that "she dances better than some of the Salomes that wear fewer clothes." She chose to emphasize the dramatic elements of the performance, coordinating her movements and expressions in order to convey the thoughts and emotions of the Salome character. The result was a technically innovative dance that "transformed the role of a highly sexualized dancer. . . into a dramatic achievement."

The success of her performance at Hammerstein's Victoria Theater, a space previously restricted to white entertainers, was evidenced when she was again welcomed to the theater the following year.

This time she was not a solo artist, but the leader and choreographer of her vaudeville troupe of dancing girls. She performed the drag number "Bon Bon Buddy," originally popularized by her husband. It became a beloved part of her vaudeville act.
             Her final engagement outside of New York took place at the Pekin Theatre in Chicago. "One of Miss Walker's ambitions has been to produce her own show", reported the Chicago Defender, "and for this special engagement she has surrounded herself with a large number of clever, pretty girls of sweet voices and nimble of feet."   For her entirely new and novel repertoire, readers were advised to secure seats in advance and avoid the rush.  Another article about  her Chicago performances commented, "Here were arrayed the cream of vaudevillians, presenting the latest and best in their line, headed by the divine Aida. . .There is but one thing that is a bit disappointing, she doesn't appear often enough on the bill."  Even in her final appearances on the stage, Aida Walker Overton always left the audience wanting more.    The theater had to turn people away nightly and the show was considered the most popular and the biggest financial success ever produced in Chicago from private sources."
        How galling it must have been to see Vernon and Irene Castle so thoroughly appropriate the popular ragtime dance craze she'd helped to initiate.  She died from kidney failure at such an early age.  Lying in state in the new St. Philip's Episcopal Church, thousands passed her bier.
       An article published two weeks after her death in New York at the age of 34, titled "Race Still Mourns for Aida Overton Walker"  reflected: "She had not passed on life's highway the stone that  marks the highest point of her achievement, but being weary for a moment she laid down by the wayside to rest." Her primary obituary in the Chicago Defender included a similar statement that "she had died before the "zenith of life".  The Philadelphia Tribune maintained that she was "in a class by herself. . . second to none in her line of work."

Resources:  Wikipedia,  http://blackacts.commons.yale.edu/exhibits/show/blackacts/walker

LEST WE FORGET DAME JUDITH ANDERSON
(February 10, 1897 - Jaunary 3, 1992)

"I have not myself a very serene temperament." Judith Anderson knew she gave fellow actors a hard time.  During the many years she starred as Medea she was extremely aware of anyone moving on her lines or taking a tone from a line that had just been said, and the cast came to dread her extensive notes after a performance.  Marian Seldes, who played one of her ladies-in-waiting, remarked that "her standards for behavior in and out of the theater were high...."

Born in Adelaide, Australia, she decided at the age of seven--when she saw Dame Nellie Melba, the Australian signer perform--that she wanted to act.
Her father, who had once been known as the "Silver king of Australia," lost his money through gambling and left his family when she was five, leaving her mother to support her children.  When they moved to Sydney in 1915 she made her first professional appearance as Stephanie in Julius Knight's production of A Royal Divorce.  After touring in several popular plays for a couple of years, members of Knight's company convinced her to try her luck in America. Armed with a letter of introduction to Cecil B. De Mille and accompanied by her mother, she traveled to Hollywood.  After four unsuccessful months, she and her mother relocated to New York.
                            Her Broadway debut occurred in 1922.  Billed as Frances Anderson (her birth name), she appeared with Arnold Daly in On the Stairs.  Changing her first name to Judith, her next notable performance was as Elsie Von Zile in Martin Brown's Cobra (1924). David Belasco cast her in a two-season run of Willard Mack's  play The Dove.  Following her role in George Kelly's
Behold the Bridegroom (1927), she succeeded Lynn Fontanne as Nina Leeds in Strange Interlude. Other starring roles in New York included: Lavinia in O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, Delia in Zoe Akins's Pulitzer-prize winning drama The Old Maid.  She had no formal training or experience in classical drama, but Guthrie McClintic insisted on casting her as Gertrude in the John Gielgud production of Hamlet (1936).  Thus was her reputation as a 'classical' actress established.  A London appearance at the Old Vic in 1937 as Lady Macbeth opposite Laurence Olivier followed.

She starred as Clytemnestra and directed Robinson Jeffers's
The Tower Beyond Tragedy.  Critics praised her Lady Macbeth opposite Maurice Evans in 1941 and when Katharine Cornell revived
The Three Sisters, she played Olga to high praise.

All of her prior performances were eclipsed however when in 1947, under the direction of John Gielgud, she created the vengeful Medea in Jeffers's adaptation of Euripides' tragedy.  It was the premiere of his play, Gielgud's first production of a Greek classic, and the first time it had been done in the modern professional theatre.  Considered by most critics to be Anderson's most brilliant portrayal, she received the Donaldson Award, the New York Critics' Award and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Award for best speech, and she was named the "First Lady of the Theatre" by the General Federation of Women's Clubs.

As Medea

She won the Tony Award for Best Actress for her performance and toured in this role in Germany in 1951 and to France and Australia 1955-56.

In 1953 she was directed by Charles Laughton in his adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body with a cast featuring Raymond Massey and Tyrone Power.
 She toured extensively in her most famous roles and played the lead in Maxwell Anderson's Elizabeth the Queen. She realized a long-held ambition to play Hamlet on a national tour of the U.S. and at New York's Carnegie Hall.   Playing Hamlet was in emulation of the Divine Sarah Bernhardt.  And in 1982 she played the role of the Nurse in Medea starring Zoe Caldwell. The New Yorker praised her "who, at eighty four, is as strong-voiced and commanding a stage presence as ever." (May 17, 1982).  Note: I saw her play the Nurse and went back stage to meet her.  She was tiny and very gracious but I was surprised at her diminutive stature, considering the fierce power of her on stage presence and voice.

As Lady Macbeth

FILM AND TV

Who has ever seen the film of Du Maurier's Rebecca, is not likely to forget her sinister, off center, Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper who tries to destroy Joan Fontaine, the second mistress of Manderley. For this convincing performance she was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress. The role led to several film appearances during the 1940s in Lady Scarface,
Kings Row, All Through the Night, Laura, The Diary of a Chambermaid. and a memorable role as Emily Brent in Rene Clair's And Then There Were None.
Other roles included a gold digger in The Furies (1950), Herodias in Salome and most notably "Big Mama" with Burl Ives as "Big Daddy" in the screen adaptation of Cat on A Hot Tin Roof also starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor.
       On television she recreated her roles as Medea and for  Lady Macbeth she won two Emmy Awards.  

As Mrs. Danvers

In the 1950s to the 1970s she recorded many 'spoken word' record albums for Caedmon Audio, including her performance as Lady Macbeth (opposite Anthony Quayle). Other recordings include an adaptation of Medea, Robert Louis Stevenson verses and readings from the Bible. For her work on the Wuthering Heights recording she received a grammy nomination.

In 1960 she received her highest honor when she was created Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (D.B.E.) in recognition of "her most distinguished contribution to the stage."
On June 10, 1991, in the Queen's Birthday Honours, she was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), "in recognition of service to the performing arts."

Source:  Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989.   Faye E. Head
Wikipedia site.