George Edward Kelly was an American dramatist. He was an actor in his early years. In 1917 he served in France during World War I and from 1918 he started his career as a writer and director of his own plays.
Background
George Edward Kelly was born on January 16, 1887 in Schuykill Falls, Pennsylvania, United States, one of ten children of impoverished Irish immigrants. His father, John H. Kelly, worked sporadically in a variety of jobs in unskilled labor; his mother, Mary Costello, was the stronger parent whose love of reading and particularly of Shakespeare had a strong impact on her son's literary development. Kelly was deeply ashamed of his background and he would later invent a biography in which he was born into a prosperous family and privately educated. Two of the other Kelly children also had illustrious careers. George's older brother, Walter, was a headliner in vaudeville where he appeared as the "Virginia Judge. " John B. Kelly, his younger brother, was a rowing champion who became an Olympic gold-medalist in 1924, and in 1929 became the father of Grace, future film star and Princess of Monaco.
Education
George Kelly was forced to leave school at an early age in order to work in the local mill.
Career
Kelly began his career as an actor. From 1911 to 1914 he played the leading roles in the national touring companies of Broadway hits like The Virginian, Live Wires, and The Common Law. In 1915 he entered vaudeville as the star of a popular one-act play called Woman Proposes. The vaudeville of his day provided high-class family entertainment and great stars like Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Ethel Barrymore were proud to appear on the major circuits. The following season, after a fruitless search for another vaudeville sketch in which to star, Kelly decided to write a play himself. For nearly two years he acted in and directed his own Finders Keepers on the Keith-Orpheum circuit.
In 1917 Kelly joined the army for a year; for the fastidious young man army life was a horror from which he could not wait to be released. From 1918 to 1922 Kelly wrote, directed, and toured with a dozen of his own vaudeville sketches. His short pieces, on such topics as marital infidelity, superstition, and class differences, already contained the astute character studies, the sly satiric jabs at middle-class pretensions, the pitched battles between bossy wives and hen-pecked husbands, and the sexual and moral conservatism, of his later full-length plays. By working in the compressed form of the vaudeville sketch, Kelly learned the importance of split-second timing and steadily building action to a climax that paid off for both the actors and the audience.
For his Broadway debut in 1922, Kelly turned one of his vaudeville pieces, Mrs. Ritter Appears, into The Torch-Bearers. It was his most purely comic work, a satire on the little theater movement of the time in which the playwright exposed the artistic and moral shortcomings of a group of small-town theatrical amateurs. As he was to do for all his work, Kelly directed, superbly choreographing a stageful of characters who often moved and talked all at the same time. The Show-Off (1924), Kelly's most famous play, was another comedy of provincial manners. Aubrey Piper, the title character, is an unwelcome son-in-law in the home of a conservative South Philadelphia family, a ne'er-do-well whose social and business maneuvers invariably misfire. Kelly's portrait is so shrewd and balanced that it transcends type; for all his foolishness the show-off proves to be loyal, dependable in a crisis, and good-hearted, and in the end he makes the financial killing that has always eluded him. His antagonist, the tart, scolding, common-sensical mother-in-law, is right about everything but lacks Aubrey's warmth. Kelly reveals the strengths and shortcomings of each of his large characters. A perennial in community and college theaters, and in summer stock, The Show-Off provided successes for Pat Carroll and Jean Stapleton; when it was revived on Broadway in 1967 it afforded Helen Hayes one of the richest roles in her career.
Kelly's next play, Craig's Wife (1925) was A Doll's House in reverse, in which a husband grows wise to, and then leaves, his autocratic spouse. Like the show-off, Craig's wife became a synonym for a national type, a house-proud suburban matron more devoted to things than to people. At the end of the play she is left completely alone. In 1936, Rosalind Russell, in her first dramatic role, portrayed Mrs. Craig on film; and in 1950, in Harriet Craig, Joan Crawford etched an especially fearsome portrait of Kelly's domestic tyrant. Kelly refused to become a slick popular entertainer or to repeat the laugh-winning formulas of The Torch-Bearers or The Show-Off. His work became increasingly austere and idiosyncratic, and the seven plays that followed his first three hits did not achieve the same popular or critical acclaim. Behold the Bridegroom (1927) was a romantic tragedy and Kelly's own favorite among his plays. Philip Goes Forth (1931) was a comedy-drama about a would-be playwright from the provinces who discovers that the theater is not his true calling. In contrast, Reflected Glory written in 1929 but not produced until 1936, was about an actress who had the goods. The Deep Mrs. Sykes (1945) and The Fatal Weakness (1946) were droll comedies of manners and a return to Kelly's favorite type: the fussy, interfering matron whose lack of self-awareness creates havoc. After he directed a 1947 revival of Craig's Wife on Broadway, Kelly wrote four more plays that he did not produce because he felt they could not be properly cast.
In retirement in Sun City, California, Kelly welcomed visits from students and aspiring playwrights. Kelly is certainly not a modernist, and his brand of well-made drawing-room comedy represents a style that, unfortunately, has long since disappeared from the theater. But within his own modestly scaled range Kelly is a master. All his plays remain stageworthy. The seemingly dictaphonic dialogue Kelly used in all his work contains a music all its own. His characters grill and bait each other in a homely wit replete with alliteration and cadenced repetition. Kelly is deeper, more incisive, and more surprising than his usual designation as a minor local colorist would suggest. Behind the vernacular snap of his dialogue is a cunning theatrical craftsman whose work transcends the boundaries of realism.
Kelly was tall, slim, and imperially handsome, with a firm jaw, dark, penetrating eyes, and a beautifully modulated speaking voice from which he had erased all traces of his humble rural origins.
Connections
Kelly had an intimate relationship with William Weagly that lasted almost fifty years.
Recipient medal of Achievement and Creative Arts award Brandeis University, 1959. Philadelphia Creative Arts Theatre award, 1962. Gold medal Women's Theatre Club, New York City.tempSpaceDrama Award of Distinction, California Alpha chapter Theta Alpha Phi, 1968.
Recipient medal of Achievement and Creative Arts award Brandeis University, 1959. Philadelphia Creative Arts Theatre award, 1962. Gold medal Women's Theatre Club, New York City.tempSpaceDrama Award of Distinction, California Alpha chapter Theta Alpha Phi, 1968.