Helen Westley, christened Henrietta Remsen Meserole Manney was born on March 28, 1875 in Brooklyn, N. Y. , the only daughter and younger of two children of Charles Palmer Manney, owner of a pharmacy, and Henrietta (Meserole) Manney. One of her maternal forebears was Jean Mesurolle, a native of Picardy who came to the New World in 1663; his descendants intermarried with Brooklyn Dutch families. Her father was of French Huguenot ancestry. Her brother, Charles Fonteyn Manney, became a music editor and composer.
Education
After attending school in Brooklyn, Henrietta received her stage training at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, New York, and at the Emerson School of Oratory, Boston.
Career
Her early dramatic career was mainly on the road, including one-night stands with an Ohio River troupe, and in vaudeville. Her first New York appearance was in the role of Angelina McKeagey in The Captain of the Non-such (September 13, 1897). Helen Westley had become a resident of Greenwich Village in New York City during its early bohemian and avant-garde period. Here, at the Liberal Club, she became acquainted with the international patent attorney and playwright Lawrence Langner, a founder of the Washington Square Players, the crusading little theatre that brought together such talented individuals as Philip Moeller, Lee Simonson, Roland Young, and Katharine Cornell. Langner wrote a stirring manifesto for the Players, who rented the Band-box Theatre on East 57th Street and opened on Feburary 19, 1915, with a bill of one-act plays. In one of these, Another Interior (a parody of Maeterlinck's Interior), a metabolistic pantomime representing a human stomach beset by gastric juices, Helen Westley, clothed in gray, impersonated an oyster. She remained with the group at the Bandbox and later at the Comedy Theatre until their demise in 1918, performing in a wide variety of plays, from Neighbors, by Zona Gale, to Chekhov's Sea Gull. Several professional engagements followed, including one in 1918 as Nastasia Ivanovna in Arthur Hopkins's famous revival of Tolstoi's Redemption, starring John Barrymore. In December 1918, at the invitation of Lawrence Langner, Helen Westley helped found America's most vital and enduring theatre, the Theatre Guild, and was a member of its original board of managers. In the Guild's opening play, Jacinto Benavente's Bonds of Interest (April 19, 1919), she took the role of Doña Sirena, and until her departure in 1936 she was the organization's most constant and durable performer, acting in over forty-five productions and finding no part too small where the good of the Guild was concerned. The following are only a handful of her many notable performances: Mrs. Clegg in Jane Clegg (1920), Mrs. Muskat in Liliom (1921), Zinida in He Who Gets Slapped (1922), Mrs. Zero in The Adding Machine (1923), Mamma in The Guardsman (1924), Aunt Ella in Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), and the unforgettable cigar-smoking Frau Lucher in Reunion in Vienna (1931). When Shaw and O'Neill became the Guild's standbys, Miss Westley found ample opportunity in their plays for her wide range of character interpretations: Ftatateeta in Caesar and Cleopatra (1925), Mrs. Amos Evans in Strange Interlude (1928, in which her daughter, Ethel Westley, also appeared), and many more. In 1934 and 1935 Helen Westley made several ventures in motion pictures, and in 1936, after much solicitation from Hollywood, she left the Guild - though remaining for a time on its board - for another highly successful acting career. Among the many films in which she played character roles were Moulin Rouge (1934), Death Takes a Holiday (1934), The House of Rothschild (1934), Roberta (1935), Show Boat (1936), and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938). She returned to Broadway as Grandma in The Primrose Path in 1939, but at the onset of her final illness she was completing a picture, My Favorite Spy (1942). Though a longtime devotee of Buddhism and Yoga, which led to the practice of a regime of spiritual and bodily health, she became incapacitated by arteriosclerosis and after a long and painful illness died from a coronary thrombosis in Franklin Township, N. J. , late in 1942. Her body was cremated at the Rosehill Crematory, Linden, N. J.
Her friends and theatrical associates agree in describing Miss Westley as a striking and unforgettable woman. Lawrence Langner was immediately attracted to her vivid, dark beauty. Theresa Helburn, later the Guild's executive director, found her, at their first meeting, "individual, striking, and Bohemian, " and confessed to being scared to death of her. Her unusual and exotic dress off-stage aroused inevitable notice. The critic George Jean Nathan, who admired her, depicted her as "begauded . .. like the gypsy queen in an 1890 comic opera. " Her forte as a character actress lay in the vivid performance of roles calling for violent, unconventional behavior. She herself blamed her casting in a long line of hags and harridans on her acceptance of the part of Matryona, accomplice in the killing of a baby, in Power of Darkness (1920). With this reputation in mind Roland Young, an associate in the Washington Square Players, caricatured her amusingly in a volume of sketches as the Theatre Guild's Private Medusa. Helen Westley's service to the Theatre Guild extended far beyond the impersonation of harridans or otherwise. As a member of the board she shared the arduous task of selecting playscripts for production; the other members were always impressed and influenced by her originality, her sincerity, her vehement and trenchant criticism, and her genuine love of the theatre. In her own words, "The popular play presents the actor; the actor of the art theatre presents a play". For her, the play was truly the thing. In one of her few errors of judgment, she rejected Green Pastures because God was portrayed as smoking a cigar, but this slip may be forgiven in view of the superior Guild repertoire over the years. In her choice of plays and in her acting she splendidly represented the great age of imaginative realism in the American theatre.
Interests
He was a longtime devotee of Buddhism and Yoga, which led to the practice of a regime of spiritual and bodily health
Connections
On October 31, 1900, in a Dutch Reformed Church ceremony, she was married to the actor John Wesley Wilson Conroy - known professionally as John Westley - after which she retired from the stage for several years. Her only child, Ethel Meserole Westley, was born in 1907. The marriage ended in divorce about 1912.