(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
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Peter Christopher Arnold Daly was an American actor and playwriter who dedicated his life to theatre and who always had passion for acting and creating new things.
Background
Peter Christopher Arnold Daly was born on October 22, 1875 in Brooklyn, New York, United States; the son of Joseph J. and Mary (Arnold) Daly, both natives of Ireland.
He was christened Peter Christopher, but later took his mother’s maiden name and dropped the others.
Education
Peter was educated in parochial schools, after being ejected, so he later declared, from four public schools for opposing rules which he considered “an insult to his intelligence. ”
Career
Peter became a call boy at the Lyceum Theatre, New York, and his first successful impersonation was that of Chambers, in Frank Mayo’s production of Puddnhead Wilson in the early nineties.
In the next few years he had considerable experience there and in London, acting especially well the crazed lover in Miss Marlowe’s production of Clyde Fitch’s Barbara Frietchie and Imp in the London production of When We Were Twenty-one. It was while he was with Miss Marlowe that he first conceived the idea of producing G. B. Shaw’s Candida, a play which Richard Mansfield had put in rehearsal but abandoned. He could not secure, however, the needed support.
After Mansfield’s tour in 1897-98 with Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, no Shaw play had been seen in America. At last, on December 9, 1903, Daly succeeded in making a single matinee production of Candida, at the Princess Theatre, New York, with Dorothy Donnelly in the title part and himself as Marchbanks. It was so successful that in partnership with Winchell Smith he rented the Berkeley Lyceum and played Candida for 150 performances.
This was the real start of the Shaw vogue in America. Thereafter Daly mounted several other Shaw plays—How He Lied to Her Husband (written for him), The Man of Destiny, You Never Can Tell, John Bull’s Other Island, and finally Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
Before the New York opening of this last play, Anthony Comstock sounded a warning, and after one try-out performance in New Haven the police stopped it there. At the New York premiere, seats were selling on the sidewalk for $25, and Police Commissioner McAdoo was in the audience. The next morning McAdoo announced that further performances would be a violation of the law.
None was given, but Daly and his leading lady, Mary Shaw, were arrested, tried in Special Sessions, and acquitted. Except for John Corbin of the Sun, all the newspaper critics called the play indecent, and Shaw was provoked to write a now highly prized pamphlet on the subject. The outbreak of Comstockery cost Daly much money and a quarrel with his managers.
After reviving Arms and the Man at the Lyric Theatre, he again rented the Berkeley Lyceum, and attempted to conduct that tiny house as “a theatre of ideas, ” during the season of 1907-08. He gave several bills of one-act plays, revived several Shaw successes, refused to advertise in the newspapers, and denied free seats to their critics. But the venture was not successful. He found himself in serious financial difficulties. The Shaw plays passed into other hands, and he never regained the place he had briefly held as a fighting leader of modernism on the American stage. He thereafter alternated engagements in vaudeville with such parts as he could secure, his better known later appearances being with Madame Simone in The Return from Jerusalem, in the title rôle of General John Regan, in The Tavern (produced by G. M. Cohan), in the title role of Voltaire, and in the Theatre Guild’s production of Juarez and Maximilian, in October 1926. On the morning of January 12, 1927, he perished in a fire which swept the house in New York where he had an apartment. His body was found seated in a chair, as if he had been caught asleep.
There can be no question but that his production of Candida and other Shaw plays, from 1903 through 1905, marked an important step forward in our theatre, and had it not been for the disastrous interference of Comstockery and his subsequent bankruptcy and intensified truculence, his later influence might have equaled that of his early years.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
Personality
Daly had a genuine appreciation of modernism in drama before most of his fellows, he was ready to fight for it and to sacrifice for it, and as an actor he possessed a nervous sensibility which made him, when willing to submit to a director’s control, an extremely vivid and effective player, particularly in such parts as Marchbanks.
Arnold Daly was a victim of tempermental excesses, which manifested themselves in violent quarrels, egotistical outbursts, and lack of cooperative spirit.
Connections
On July 1, 1900 Daly married Mary Blythe, an actress. They had one child, Blythe Daly, who eventually went on the stage. They were divorced in 1903 and were later reunited, only to separate again, Mrs. Daly becoming Mrs. Frank Craven.