The stage actor Edwin Thomas Booth is considered by many to have been the finest Hamlet of the 19th century. He was born on his father's farm in Maryland on November 13, 1833. Although early on Edwin took up both the violin and the banjo, it was not assumed -- and rather hoped -- that he would not follow in the famous footsteps of his father, the classical actor Junius Brutus Booth. Young Edwin's first exposure to the life of the theatre was from backstage --the dressing rooms, rooming houses, and taverns from which he would often have to rescue the wayward patriarch of the Booth acting clan.
Edwin Booth - 1886
Edwin's stage debut took place in Boston on Sept. 10, 1849, when Mr. Thoman, the prompter decided that he was too over-burdened to handle both his prompt duties as well as perform onstage in one of the minor roles in Richard III. He urged the 18-year-old Edwin to take the part of Tressel, much to the dismay of Junius Brutus, who was starring in the title role. Edwin proved a tremendous success, and American theatrical history was made, launching the pale, slight, intense-looking young man on one of the greatest stage careers ever.
Booth traveled with his father's troupe on a tour to San Francisco,
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just three years after the Gold Rush. Edwin's triumph in Boston back in 1849 had made the patriarch of the Booth theatrical dynasty receptive to his sons joining him on the stage. In November, 1864, just weeks after Edwin cast his first and only vote for a political candidate-supporting the re-election of President Abraham Lincoln, the Booth brothers appeared together in a production of Shakes-peare's Julius Caesar. Ironically, Edwin played the murderous Brutus, while his younger brother, John Wilkes, took the role of Caesar's greatest defender, Marc Antony. Just a few months later, on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes would assassinate America's leader during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC.
After Lincoln's assassination and the ensuing vitriol launched by the public at the Booth family specifically and at actors in general, Edwin Booth elected to retire from the stage, but his absence was short-lived. Less than a year later, on January 3, 1866, Edwin reappeared onstage in New York, playing Hamlet at his Winter Garden Theatre.
Like many of his contemporaries, Booth was an actor-manager, not only starring and touring in the great stage classics, but also acting as a theatre owner. The death of his beloved first wife, actress Mary Devlin, in 1863, had left him desolate and he threw himself into his art, leasing the Winter Garden Theatre in New York and purchasing with J.S. Clarke the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, as well as owning more than one Manhattan residence. Booth's lavishness and liberality with his productions was legendary and his fortunes accordingly rose and fell, following the opening of his own theatre in 1869. On June 7 of that year, he married a second time to actress Mary McVicker, the step-daughter of a Chicago theatre owner. Unfortunately, her talents were nothing like those of Booth's first Mary, and McVicker's performances as Shakespeare's heroines more than contributed to the failure of the company's first |
Booth and Henry Irving in "Othello" in 1881.
season. In 1874, the 40 year-old Booth filed a petition of bankruptcy. A year later, his father-in-law bought up his debts, but his wife began a slow descent into the paranoid madness that would eventually destroy her.
In an attempt to recover his losses, Booth toured throughout the United States and Europe, appearing on the London stage in 1881 in repertory performances with England's most celebrated tragedian, Henry Irving. The two actors alternated in the roles of Othello and Iago. Their Desdemona was Irving's customary co-star, Ellen Terry. By this time, Booth was considered the wealthiest actor in America, but his domestic life was far from blissful. His wife steadily accused him of psychological abuse, slipping further and further out of all rationalism. On November 13, 1881, Edwin Booth's 48th birthday, Mary McVicker Booth died.
Throughout the world, from San Francisco across America, Europe, and as far off as Australia, Edwin Booth earned renown for his portrayals of Hamlet, Macbeth, Brutus, Richard III, Iago, Shylock, Othello, and Cardinal Richelieu. His performances demonstrated a "new" style of acting which explored the characters' emotional depths and complexities without resorting to the |
declamatory style of his contemporaries and of previous generations of thespians.
Given his family history, Booth felt a special responsibility to elevate the profession of the actor. Other theatrical clubs existed at the time, but Booth's gentleman's club was the first of its kind created with the express purpose of bringing men of the theatre together with captains of industry in order to "elevate" the status of the actor and place him on an equal footing with upstanding men in nontheatrical professions.
On Jan. 7, 1888, The Players was officially incorporated. Celebrated architect Stanford White was commissioned to remodel the townhouse which Booth had purchased, built in the mid 1840s for banker Elihu Townsend. Months later, at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, 1888, Edwin Booth stood on a dais before the marble mantelpiece in the Great Hall of 16 Gramercy Park, and beneath a portrait of his father, deeded the property to The Players, upon the proviso that Edwin maintain his residence on the third floor.
The 59-year-old Booth became ill in 1892, still despondent over the death of Mary Devlin nearly three decades earlier, and over the recent demise of his dear friend and colleague Lawrence Barrett, who also had rooms on the third floor of the townhouse.
On June 7, 1893, with his beloved daughter Edwina by his side, during a thunderstorm as dramatic as Booth's life and career, when the lights suddenly went out all over Gramercy Park, the century's greatest American tragedian died in his bed. In the next moment, the electricity restored itself, and Booth's physician waved his white handkerchief from the third floor window to signal the vigilant fans and journalists that "the greatest American actor" had passed. |
