Background
Edward Askew Sothern, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on December 6, 1859. He was the son of English actor E. A. Sothern and his wife Frances Emily "Fannie" Stewart.
Edward Askew Sothern, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on December 6, 1859. He was the son of English actor E. A. Sothern and his wife Frances Emily "Fannie" Stewart.
Sothern was educated in England at St Marylebone Grammar School.
He toured England in 1882 and 1883 and joined the company of John McCullough in the latter year; from then until 1899 he was leading man in Daniel Frohman's Lyceum Theatre company in New York. Sothern had enormous success in romantic comedies on the order of Richard Lovelace, If I Were King, and The Prisoner of Zenda, and in Gerhart Hauptmann's mystical play The Sunken Bell. He first played Hamlet in 1900. In 1904 he made his first appearance opposite Julia Marlowe, in Romeo and Juliet. Thereafter their notable partnership in Shakespearean repertory made them the foremost exponents of the classic drama of their day. In 1916 he presented a gala revival of If I Were King to raise money for the British Red Cross. After Julia Marlowe's permanent retirement from the theater in 1924, Sothern appeared under the management of David Belasco in two plays, Accused and Hidden, in 1925 and 1926, after which he left the stage to embark on a lecture tour. Sothern died in New York City at the Plaza Hotel, of pneumonia, in 1933 at the age of 73 and was cremated.
Quotations: "I have not left the stage; the stage has left me. "
He was married twice: to Virginia Harned in 1896, and to Julia Marlowe in 1911.
