Cornelia Otis Skinner was an American actress, playwright, and author.
Background
She was born on May 30, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois, United States, the daughter of Otis Skinner and Maud Durbin, actors who were on tour at the time. Otis Skinner had learned his craft in supporting roles to the leading Shakespearean actor, Edwin Booth. His wife retired from the stage when their daughter was born. The Skinners maintained a home in Bryn Mawr, where Skinner was brought up.
Skinner grew tall and lanky in her adolescence, features she was to convert to a dignified, commanding presence onstage and off.
Education
She spent two years as a student at Bryn Mawr College but found she could not grasp anything as abstract or as rote-taught as mathematics. In the company of her mother, a woman of considerable cultivation, Skinner continued her education in Paris at the Sorbonne, where she gained a deep appreciation of European civilization, especially Parisian, and received classical training in theater from Jacques Copeau and Emile Debelly, the latter of the Comedie Francaise.
Career
Upon returning to America after studies, Skinner made the rounds of casting calls; the prominent producer Winthrop Ames gave her several small roles.
She made her Broadway debut in Clemence Dane's Will Shakespeare at the National Theater in January 1923, having first appeared professionally in a small role in Blood and Sand with her father's company (1921). For him she wrote an adaptation of a novel, Captain Fury, which opened in 1925. Roles came regularly thereafter, and Skinner appeared in the light, forgettable comedies and dramas that filled the large number of theaters on Broadway. Among the plays were Tweedles, In the Next Room, The Wild Westcotts, In His Arms, and White Collars.
Combining the careers of wife, mother, and professional actress, Skinner was soon as busy as ever, with increasing emphasis on writing. She thought in terms of a produced play or monologue as she wrote, because for her, speech, movement, and ideas were inseparable. She had appeared there in a well-received monologue version of The Wives of Henry VIII; other multicharacter productions were The Empress Eugenie and The Loves of Charles II.
In 1938, Skinner brought the dramatization of Margaret Ayer Barnes's novel Edna, His Wife. She toured widely in Edna, which was enthusiastically received by the public, although the New York critics were more restrained in their reviews. She was highly successful in the title role of George Bernard Shaw's Candida (1935) and as Lady Britomart in Shaw's Major Barbara (1946), as well as Mrs. Erlynne in Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1946).
In 1944 she played Emily Hazen, wife of an American diplomat, in Lillian Hellman's The Searching Wind, which had a long run at the Fulton Theater and an extensive national tour.
The 1930's marked the heyday of a new medium, network radio, which could make good use of the monologue technique. Skinner was heard frequently on the networks.
Her family lived in a mansion on Long Island's fashionable North Shore, where she wrote many pieces in the easy, conversational style that was her trademark. Many of her sketches appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Ladies' Home Journal, and other magazines. Condensed in Reader's Digest, made into a motion picture in 1944, and dramatized by Jean Kerr in 1948, the story reached millions more.
Her one foray into scholarship was Madame Sarah (1967), a biography of Sarah Bernhardt. In a more relaxed vein, Skinner wrote the story Life with Lindsay and Crouse (1976). Over the years her essays were collected in three volumes, Tiny Garments (1932), That's Me All Over (1948), and Bottoms Up (1955).
Her reminiscences of the Skinner and Blodgett families are in Family Circle (1948), which, while in no sense an autobiography or even a memoir, contains much about the lives of her and her relatives.
During the early postwar years the theater saw relatively little of Skinner. She became active in the National Conference of Christians and Jews. In 1951 she was elected its secretary and in 1960 was national chairman of the observance of Brotherhood Week, for which she received a silver plaque in 1961.
In 1951 she undertook a research trip to Paris, where she accumulated facts of Parisian life in the 1890's and read many memoirs, scandalous and otherwise, of this era. The result was a monodrama that is widely considered her greatest success in that form, a revue called Paris '90.
Ten years later Skinner published Paris in Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals (1962). One last Broadway triumph remained for Skinner after Paris '90. She shared the leading roles with Cyril Ritchard and Dolores Hart, and the dialogue sparkled with repartee. The play opened at the Longacre Theatre in 1958 and toured nationally in 1960.
The rest of Skinner's life was devoted largely to writing. After her husband died in 1964, she left the mansion on Long Island, where they had lived for nearly forty years, for an equally baronial apartment in New York City. She died in New York City of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Achievements
Cornelia Otis Skinner wrote numerous short humorous pieces for publications like The New Yorker, they were included into a series of books, including Nuts in May, Dithers and Jitters, Excuse It Please! Her greatest success was a best-selling book Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, the book charmed millions. The greatest Broadway triumph remained for Skinner after Paris '90 and it was a notable one, a fully produced play entitled The Pleasure of His Company.
Skinner was a frequent guest on the sophisticated, extremely popular radio show "Information Please". Her scripts for the prime-time radio serial "William and Mary" raised the show above the average for the genre.
She was long the enemy of ethnic discrimination, especially anti-Semitism.
Views
Quotations:
"Acting, " she said, "is less painful than writing - and faster. "
Personality
She was tall, dark, and stately, well-spoken yet informal. Theatrical people, especially playwrights, producers, and directors, were among her closest friends.
Connections
Skinner married Alden S. Blodgett, a wealthy banker and sportsman, on October 2, 1928; they had one child. During the years when her son was growing up, Skinner was a dutiful, loving mother and wife.
