artists of our stage, if she and her managers could only agree to let
her remain so. She revived _Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire_, and played it with
far more feeling and a more convincing sense of maternity than she had
shown before; she has played the insurgent wife in Barrie’s one-act
masterpiece, _The Twelve-Pound-Look_, with a sure-handed mastery of
the ironic and subtle that belongs only to a finished actress; she
has, most recently of all, acted Madame Okraska, in the dramatization
of _Tante_, with a keenness of insight into character and a finesse
that showed again how far she had traveled since the days of _Captain
Jinks_. Let us hope that henceforth Miss Barrymore’s unquestioned
talent will not be allowed to expend itself on unworthy material.
Next to Mrs. Fiske, the leading actress of our contemporary stage is
undoubtedly Margaret Anglin.[214] Her training has had a wider range,
and her artistry a more varied accomplishment, than those of any other
actress on our stage. Born in Canada of a non-theatrical family, she
came to New York to study. She is one of our few brilliant actresses
who have come to the stage by way of the dramatic schools. In 1894,
when she was eighteen, she was Madeline West in Charles Frohman’s
production of _Shenandoah_. When she was twenty she was playing Ophelia
and Virginia in James O’Neill’s company, and from that day to this she
has been one of America’s dependable and versatile stage artists.
A few years ago we thought of her as a powerful emotional actress
who had come through an apprenticeship in barnstorming, and an early
recognition of merit as Roxane to Mansfield’s Cyrano, to full measured
achievement in _Mrs. Dane’s Defence_, _The Great Divide_, and _The
Awakening of Helena Ritchie_,--with a large number of plays and parts
scattered in between. But of late years she has broadened her art and
made secure her place among contemporary actresses not only by plunging
wholeheartedly into a campaign in Shakespeare, but by ranging even
farther and acting the heroines of Greek tragedy. Miss Anglin is as
effective in comedy--witness _Green Stockings_ and _Lady Windermere’s
Fan_ as recent instances, and her Lady Eastney in _Mrs. Dane’s
Defence_ for an earlier one--as she is in emotional rôles; she has
acted in Australia as well as in America; she was the first artist to
carry about the country a repertoire of plays set in accordance with
the ideals of the new stagecraft; and as Mr. Eaton has said, “as a
stage manager she has succeeded in reviving something of the atmosphere
of good breeding, of polite comedy, of perfect ensemble and polish,
which we associate with the memory of Lester Wallack.” It is an ample,
dignified career, now happily at its height, of hard working service to
the art of the actress.
When in 1913 Miss Anglin made herself a Shakespearean actress-manager,
the size of her repertoire, the general excellence of her
interpretations, and the revelation of the beauties of the new stage
art that signalized her performances combined to give American
theatregoers a new idea of her ability and broadening ambition.
The plays were _The Taming of the Shrew_, _Twelfth Night_, _As You
Like It_, and _Antony and Cleopatra_; the scenery in each case was
a beautiful example--by Livingston Platt--of the imaginative revolt
from old stage conventions that has notably marked the last decade;
and Miss Anglin’s own women of Shakespeare,--though her Cleopatra was
a comparative failure and was soon dropped from her repertoire, and
though her Viola was to a degree lacking in high spirits--were charming
and technically admirable impersonations.
In the Greek Theatre of the University of California at Berkeley, Miss
Anglin has acted four of the classic dramas of ancient Greece,--the
_Antigone_ and the _Electra_ of Sophocles, the _Iphigenia in Auris_
and the _Medea_ of Euripides. Though her training and her speech have
always been primarily those of the modern actress, she has revealed
in these classic tragedies a simplicity of method and an authority of
voice and presence that few actresses, either of England or America,
could equal. With Miss Lillah McCarthy presenting so beautifully the
women of Greek tragedy at one end of the country, and Miss Anglin at
the other, the classics have had a day of real, if brief, glory.
If the roster of American actresses is given a cosmopolitan aspect by
the inclusion of the names of Edith Wynne Matthison, Martha Hedman,
Hedwig Reicher and Bertha Kalich, all of whom lived many years in
Europe, the most striking example of all is Alla Nazimova.[215] She
was born in Russia, went to school in Switzerland, studied the violin
at Odessa, the drama in Moscow, and after a few years’ apprenticeship
in her native land and a year at St. Petersburg, she acted with Paul
Orleneff’s company (of course, in Russian) in London. Coming then to
America she played a season in Russian with her compatriots; and then,
in June, 1906, having signed a contract to act in English in November
of the same year, she set herself to the mastery of the new language,
much as Modjeska had done thirty years before. She kept her word,
and when the appointed time came she acted _Hedda Gabler_, which she
followed during the next half-dozen years, with others of Ibsen’s
plays: _A Doll’s House_, _The Master Builder_, _Little Eyolf_, as well
as several other plays, like _The Comet_, _The Marionettes_, and _Bella
Donna_, in none of which the actress possessed the significance that
marked her when she confined herself to Ibsen.
To play first in an obscure hall on the lower East Side, then in two or
three scarcely less obscure theatres, and then, a year and a half after
her unheralded arrival, to act in a new tongue in one of New York’s
leading theatres--it all makes one of the most dramatic of careers.
If, however, Nazimova is “a tigress in the leash of art,” as Julius
Huneker called her, an artist must hold the leash, or it becomes too
much a circus tigress, going through the expected tricks, but in a cage
of which she is always conscious. Nazimova did us a real service in
her vivid impersonation of Ibsen’s heroines. Mrs. Fiske apart, no one
else has done much for Ibsen in this country. But apparently she cannot
go on playing Ibsen profitably; her art, which “expresses itself in a
continual physical virtuosity which startles and thrills,” does not
find an outlet in the sort of play English and American dramatists are
likely to write; and, as Mr. Ruhl points out, “of late she has drifted
far from her simpler beginnings and over-accented the more exotic side
of her personality as if determined to ‘run it into the ground.’” Like
another actress of striking talent, Nance O’Neil, Madame Nazimova is
idle chiefly because she and the dramatists seem unable to meet on a
common ground.
The case for the poetic actress is little better. After acquiring
in England a thorough grounding in her profession, Edith Wynne
Matthison[216] came to America in 1903 and played _Everyman_ with a
dignity, a charm of voice and person, and a poetic poignancy that made
the fifteenth-century “morality” forever memorable for any one who saw
it. After brief experiments with Viola, Portia, and Kate Hardcastle,
she returned to England, and then, after dividing the intervening years
between her old home and her new, she settled more or less permanently
in America in 1910, when she joined the company of the New Theatre. She
must be regarded as of the American theatre.
Miss Matthison is preëminently a poetic actress. Her moods and methods,
her rich and tender voice, her whole training and personality fit her
rarely for the realization of the heroines of poetic drama. How truly
this is not the age of the poetic drama, however, is shown by the short
list of rôles--outside of Shakespeare’s heroines--that Miss Matthison
has had, at once adapted to her and worthy of her talents. At the New
Theatre she played Sister Beatrice in Maeterlinck’s play of that name,
_The Piper_, and Light in _The Blue Bird_. And the New Theatre was
not wholly a response to public taste; it was largely an attempt to
foster it. For the rest, Miss Matthison’s American appearances (and her
English experience was similar) have been distributed among many plays
of many kinds, some of them excellent, like _The Great Divide_ and _The
Servant in the House_, but all of them rather beside the point, so far
as Miss Matthison’s peculiar talent was concerned. When she played, and
beautifully played, Andromache in Mr. Barker’s recent production of
_The Trojan Women_, she again came briefly into her own.
If Miss Anglin and Miss Matthison almost exhaust our list of first-rate
poetic actresses (now that Miss Marlowe has retired), the case is far
otherwise with the _comédiennes_. There are two, at least,--Grace
George and Laura Hope Crews,--who are practiced adepts, thoroughly at
home amid the subtleties of high comedy.
The place of Miss George[217] among American actresses is only partly
indicated by the announcement that she is to direct her own theatre in
New York. Though she merits that distinction, it is one that is easily
within the grasp of the wife of William A. Brady. But it is indeed
something to be one of our few actresses who are mistresses of comedy.
Miss George made her first appearance on the professional stage
(she had previously acted much as an amateur) as long ago as 1894,
but it was not until 1907, when she acted Cyprienne in _Divorçons_,
that she disclosed her talent brought to its fullness by long and
varied training. Playing with her in _Divorçons_ was that excellent
actor, Frank Worthing, and the effect produced by them remains one
of the memorable incidents of American acting.[218] During the dozen
years that preceded _Divorçons_ and again during the period that has
followed, Miss George has been condemned to play in a long succession
of comparatively inferior plays. The list is varied only occasionally
by brief appearances in genuine high comedy, such as her Lady Teazle in
_The School for Scandal_ at the New Theatre and her Beatrice in _Much
Ado About Nothing_. Taking it all in all, she is best represented, so
far, by her Cyprienne, an admirable impersonation, compact with rich
humor, naturalness and charm,--and achievement in real comedy. Miss
George promises to come into her own, however, with the opening of the
theatre in New York of which she is to be the guiding spirit and the
chief actress, for, if promise fails not, it is to be a rigorously
guarded home of nothing but the best in the realm of comedy.
Like Miss George, Laura Hope Crews[219] has earned by long training
and by brilliant accomplishment the admiration she now wins. She had
been a child actress in the far West, and, returning to the stage
in her ’teens, had undergone the rigorous training of stock company
work in San Francisco and New York for a half dozen years before she
attracted any considerable notice. Such an experience in American stock
companies, with weekly changes of bill, means either a sinking to a
dead level of mechanical acting, or a constantly enlarging technical
resource. The latter was the case with Miss Crews. As Mr. Eaton has
pointed out, though she has come to be looked upon as an actress of
such sunny parts as Polly in _The Great Divide_, and the whimsical
heroine of _Her Husband’s Wife_, it is because Miss Crews for so long
went from such plays as Hoyt’s _A Bunch of Keys_, to others like
_Magda_ and _Hedda Gabler_ that she is today not merely an attractive
personality, but an actress of complete technical equipment. Such she
has again proved herself to be by the finesse of her impersonation of
the wife in _The Phantom Rival_. By virtue of the power of consistent
impersonation which she brings to bear upon her warmly human heroines,
her high spirits and her thoroughly trained resources of humorous
suggestion, she has earned a high place as a _comédienne_; but the
sincerity and the variety of her art would equip her at a moment’s
notice to revert to the emotional heroines of a more sober drama.
It is becoming too apparent that we have seen the last of the charming
and delicate art of Annie Russell; the physical power and the
emotional intensity of Nance O’Neil’s very real talent find their
expression only in plays of a Bernhardtian type that to a great extent
has gone out of fashion on the American stage; Rose Stahl, after a long
career as America’s best stock actress, leaped into international fame
by a single masterpiece of characterization (in _The Chorus Lady_)
which she has not since had an occasion to duplicate; and the charming
and well-grounded acting ability of Henrietta Crosman, always condemned
to deal with second-rate plays, seems to have run its course, so far as
the public is concerned.
To replace these and the other actresses[220] who have dropped from
the ranks of active service, or who will, before many years pass,
do so, there is, as we have said, no lack of younger women. A stage
that can count upon Helen Ware, Margaret Illington, Emma Dunn, Elsie
Ferguson, Emily Stevens, Frances Starr, Jane Cowl, Martha Hedman, Doris
Keane, Laurette Taylor, Irene Fenwick, and Florence Reed is suffering
no weakness on its distaff side. If only our accomplished young
actors were as numerous! For each of these women is more than a mere
personality--she is a real actress, mistress of the tools of her trade.
Like Miss Anglin, Margaret Illington learned the rudiments of her
art in a dramatic school. Coming then from Chicago to New York, she
was immediately engaged by Daniel Frohman for a part in _The Pride
of Jennico_. That was fifteen years ago, and it would be beside
the point to rank her with those who are, comparatively, untried
beginners. Miss Illington is a practiced player with more than a score
of excellent impersonations to her credit; of which Mrs. Leffingwell
in _Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots_, Nina Jesson in _His House in Order_,
Marie Voysin in _The Thief_, Maggie Schultz in _Kindling_, and Elinor
Shale in _The Lie_ are merely the outstanding names. But she is still
young and she is one of those who can be counted on to carry on the
torch for years to come. “Miss Illington leaves no delicate nuance
of expression untouched,” has been written of her. “She has great
vitality and physical beauty; she has a perfectly secure and accurate
dramatic instinct.... In two of the finest moments [of _The Lie_] Miss
Illington rises to tragic heights. In all of the lighter scenes she is
deliciously youthful and piquant.... Fleeting glimpses of humor and
enfolding sweetness, and then the big frantic outbursts of righteous
anger and superb accusations.” In a part of quite another sort, the
harassed wife in _Kindling_, Miss Illington “acted the ignorant, dumbly
struggling, desperate mother truly, simply, touchingly.”
Miss Ferguson is a graduate of the musical comedy chorus, and, for
an actress who shows so much ability, her dramatic training has been
brief. Only a half dozen rôles had followed her chorus-girls days when
she was given a part in _Such a Little Queen_. She was not a star
when the play was produced, but not many days had gone by when her
managers boldly, and perhaps prematurely, elevated her to starship. Her
beauty and intelligence went far to justify her promotion, and when
the pleasantries of _Such a Little Queen_ and _The First Lady of the
Land_ were followed by the greater complexities of _The Strange Woman_
and _Outcast_, it became plain that Miss Ferguson’s emotional truth
and sense of impersonation could be those of only a genuine actress.
The intellectual note that is strong in her work, and the fluency,
versatility and certainty of the technique that she has somehow
acquired in her short career, make her the most promising of our
younger actresses.
Like Miss Ferguson, Miss Stevens is beautiful, and alive to the
finger-tips with the keen intelligence of the modern American woman at
her best. Excellent training in her distinguished cousin’s company she
has followed by pleasing performances of Emmy in _Septimus_ and Anne
in _Man and Superman_, but of late the plays to which she has been
assigned,--like _The Child_ and _The Garden of Paradise_, have failed
so lamentably that the light of her talent is in temporary eclipse.
In Helen Ware, America has an actress who, though her art, as so far
revealed, is comparatively limited in scope, is in the very first
rank of impersonators of highly-colored “character” parts and of
the masterful women of modern melodrama. Her vivid gypsy girl in
_The Road to Yesterday_ impressed American theatregoers when she had
been on the stage a half-dozen years, and since then her work in
_The Third Degree_, _The Woman_ and _Within The Law_ have more than
reënforced that impression. She is an utterly sincere actress, who
plans and executes her characterizations with admirable and convincing
consistency.
Emma Dunn’s succession of perfectly limned stage portraits of elderly
women; Frances Starr’s achievements as Laura Murdock in _The Easiest
Way_ and as Dorothy in _The Case of Becky_; Jane Cowl’s Mary Turner
in _Within The Law_, an impersonation that took Miss Cowl at a single
bound almost to the side of Helen Ware; the beautifully feminine and
intelligent acting--in an acquired tongue--of Martha Hedman, who has
come to us from Sweden; the charmingly restrained and skillful work
of Florence Reed in _The Yellow Ticket_; Doris Keane’s admirably
lifelike and subtle impersonation of a prima donna of the sixties in
_Romance_; Irene Fenwick’s vivid Lily Kardos in _The Song of Songs_,
and Laurette Taylor’s exotic princess in _The Bird of Paradise_, and
her delightfully human, humorously pathetic, internationally memorable
Peg;--these have hardly had time to become memories. Surely, so far
as actresses are concerned, our stage is richly endowed. And not only
with native talent. Hedwig Reicher, of German birth and training and an
excellent actress of Ibsen’s heroines, and Bertha Kalich, who was born
in Austria and acted in New York in Yiddish, have both adopted America
and the English tongue and, like Alla Nazimova and Martha Hedman, must
henceforth be counted among America’s actresses. Mimi Aguglia is living
in our midst, and acts in Italian when, all too rarely, opportunity
presents itself.
As for visitors from England, Marie Tempest, Mrs. Patrick Campbell
and Gertrude Elliott are almost as familiarly known in this country
as at home; the girlish charm of Phyllis Neilson-Terry, and the ample
art of Lillah McCarthy, who is equal alike to the exacting demands of
Greek tragedy and Shavian satire, it has recently been the privilege
of America to witness; Mary Forbes is a newcomer, an actress skilled
in both poetic drama and realistic plays; and the too rare visits of
the Irish Players have given us the pungent and stimulating art of Sara
Allgood.
This chapter, or rather this list,--it could be little more with so
many ladies clamoring for their deserved attention,--has at least
made one thing clear. On the feminine side of the art of acting, the
only art in which women compete with men on more than even terms, the
American stage is in a healthy condition. It has been said, often with
cynical emphasis, that in America the audiences of women condition the
whole art of the drama. But it is not only at the box-office that women
outweigh the men in their share in our theatre.
APPENDIX
THE FIRST ENGLISH ACTRESSES, AND THE CHANGE IN THE ACTOR’S SOCIAL STATUS
The actress, as an established element in the theatre, is comparatively
modern. The English stage had been a flourishing public institution
for something more than a century when, in the first years of the
Restoration, veritable women began regularly to replace those lads and
beardless men who in Shakespeare’s day enacted stage heroines.
There are, to be sure, fleeting glimpses of women acting in England
much earlier in the seventeenth century, while boys were regularly
playing women’s parts. King James spent immense sums on his court
revels, and his Queen, Anne, was both actress and manager--no doubt
with much professional coaching. In 1625--the first year of the reign
of Charles I--there was a merry round of plays acted at Hampton Court
at Christmas time. “The demoiselles,”--who, as Doran surmises, were
probably the maids of honor--“mean to present a French pastoral wherein
the Queen is a principal actress.”[221] Thus the first actresses in
England were amateurs, and among them were two Queens of the Realm!
Henrietta Maria was, of course, French, and it was due to this fact,
and to her liking for the stage, that actresses from France came to
London[222]--doubtless the first professional actresses to appear
there. The fashion--or rather the obvious advantages--of the acting of
women’s parts by women appears to have commended itself much earlier
on the continent than in England. “They have now,” contemptuously says
Prynne,--the author of _Histrio-Mastix_ (1633) and the theatre’s best
hater,--“their female players in Italy and other foreign parts.”[223]
The French actresses who came to act at Blackfriars may have pleased
their countrywoman, the Queen. But they seem to have had, on the whole,
a rather hard time. “Glad am I to say,” wrote Thomas Brand, another
stout Puritan, “they were hissed, hooted, and pippin-pelted from the
stage, so that I do not think they will soon be ready to try the same
again.” Prynne was furiously abusive. He calls the actresses by a
variety of names, of which “monsters” is one of the mildest.
But to some extent, the idea had taken root, and during the ten years
before the closing of the theatres, in 1642, women occasionally
replaced the boys and men who passed for heroines. In _The Court
Beggar_, a play enacted in London in 1632, one of the characters, Lady
Strangelove, says: “The boy’s a pretty actor, and his mother can play
her part. The women now are in great request.” These early actresses
were, however, not regularly employed, their names have not come down
to us, and it is correct to say that professional English actresses
appear for the first time, when, in 1660, the theatres were reopened,
after their eighteen years’ suppression by the Puritans.[224]
There were two companies, Killigrew’s and D’Avenant’s. Each had its
regularly enrolled actresses, whose names are recorded. Among them
were Mrs. Corey, Mrs. Hughes, Mrs. Knipp, the Marshall sisters, Mrs.
Davenport, Mrs. Saunderson, and, a little later, Nell Gwynn.
No one, however, took the trouble to make certain for posterity the
name of the first of them to appear. We know that she played Desdemona,
in an adaptation of _Othello_, called _The Moor of Venice_; that she
was of Killigrew’s company; that the date was December 8, 1660, and the
place the Red Bull; and that Thomas Jordan wrote for the occasion “A
Prologue, to introduce the first woman that came to act on our stage.”
But who the actress was is not known. Two names are the likeliest:
Margaret Hughes, and Anne Marshall. Mrs. Hughes was “more remarkable
for her beauty than for her great ability.” “A mighty pretty woman,”
says Pepys of her, “and seems, but is not, modest.” She was married
later to Prince Rupert, and brought him to the verge of bankruptcy.
Anne Marshall, the other chief claimant, was a competent actress of
the day, remarkable chiefly for being the daughter of a prominent
Presbyterian clergyman.