Charles Klein was a British-born American dramatist. He began his association with the theatre as an actor but soon gave up that branch of the profession for the writing of plays.
Background
Charles Klein was born on January 07, 1867 in London, England, the son of Hermann and Adelaide (Soman) Klein, and was one of four brothers: Hermann, musician and teacher of singing; Alfred, actor; and Manuel, musician and composer; and Charles.
Career
Klein came to the United States in 1883 and for a time acted the title role in Little Lord Fauntleroy, and parts in The Messenger from Jarvis Section and The Romany Rye, for which he was especially fitted by his diminutive stature. While appearing in The Schatchen in New York (1890), he was commissioned by M. B. Curtis to rewrite that play, and thus he began his labors as a dramatist that continued uninterruptedly for the rest of his life.
His next work was the construction, in collaboration with Charles Coote, an English actor, of a melodrama for Minnie Palmer, A Mile a Minute, its inspiration being two large lithographic pictures in the possession of her manager. Thereafter his plays followed one another so rapidly that there was scarcely a theatrical season which did not bring to the stage from him at least one play, some of them written by his own unassisted hand, and others in collaboration. Among the most popular of the latter were The District Attorney with Harrison Grey Fiske (1895), Heartsease with J. I. C. Clarke (1897), and The Auctioneer with Lee Arthur (1901), the last especially prepared for David Warfield when he was beginning his career as a star under the direction of David Belasco. Its popularity led to the writing of another play of Jewish character for the same actor, The Music Master (1904), a sentimental comedy that succeeded through Warfield's personality and dramatic skill rather than on account of any merits of its own. Among the better known of his plays that followed are The Lion and the Mouse (1905), The Third Degree (1909), The Gamblers (1910), and Maggie Pepper (1911). These and many of his other plays were as timely and as transitory as the first page of a daily newspaper.
As Arthur Hobson Quinn has said: Klein "belongs in our dramatic history mainly by the fact that his plays were concerned frequently with themes of contemporary life in the United States. He had a theory of playwriting which was higher than his practice. " Klein's personal attitude toward his work is clearly shown by his remark: "I cannot see how Bernard Shaw, who denies everything from pure love to pure music, can be a public benefactor; only the man who affirms what is good tells the whole truth. " He was not unversatile, however, for he made an English version of Pierre de Courcelles's French melodrama, Les Deux Gosses, under the title of Two Little Vagrants (1896), and he wrote the librettos of two light operas, El Capitan (1896) with music by John Philip Sousa, acted with De Wolf Hopper in the title role, and of Red Feather (1903), with music by Reginald de Koven.
He served for a time as play reader and censor on the staff of Charles Frohman, with whom he was one of the victims of the sinking of the Lusitania by the Germans in the second year of the World War. His theory of the dramatist's work was that it is primarily a reportorial task that took the ideas of the moment for texts, and that it was an artifice rather than an art. Thus his plays are not so much reproductions of real life as they are shrewd and clever constructions designed to hold the attention of the audience as it may also be held by the reading of a daily newspaper or timely magazine article.
Klein died during the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, at the age of 48.
Achievements
Connections
Klein married Lillian Gottlieb of New York on July 10, 1888. Together they had two children.