(CHRYSTAL HERNE The early 1900s stage actress and daughter...)
CHRYSTAL HERNE The early 1900s stage actress and daughter of the playwright James A. Herne signs her name with a sentiment Autograph Sentiment Signed: "Faithfully yours/ Chrystal Herne" in black ink, 5½x2½. Chrystal Herne (1883-1950) was an American stage actress during the early decades of the twentieth century. She was the daughter of actor/playwright James A. Herne, and the younger sister of actress and Hollywood talent scout Julie Herne. Herne made her stage debut in Washington, D.C. at the age of sixteen as Sue Hardy in her father's play Rev. Griffith Davenport. Over the following two seasons she played Jane Cauldwell in Sag Harbor, written by her father. The play centered on a family affair with Herne and his daughters Julie and Chrystal playing principle roles. Moreover, she was remembered for playing the title role in Arnold Daly's production of Shaw's Candida during the 1905/06 season and as Vera Revendal opposite Walker Whiteside in Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot that debuted in 1908 at the Columbia Theatre in Washington, D.C. A few of her other appearances came in a 1911 revival of The Squaw Man at the Broadway Theatre and a Morosco Theatre production of Craig's Wife, in which she played the title role opposite Charles Trowbridge. Herne appeared in some thirty-seven Broadway productions over the course of her career. Her last performance was in A Room in Red and White, which had a two-month run in January and February of 1936. Toned. Corners rounded. Mounting residue on verso. Otherwise, fine condition. - Please contact us if you have any questions or require additional information. HFSID 343808
Katherine Chrystal Herne was an American stage actress. She appeared in As a Man Thinks (1911), and was particularly well-received in the first U. S. production of W. Somerset Maugham's Our Betters (1917). In the 1920s, Herne's notable appearances included Expressing Willie (1924) and Craig's Wife (1925).
Background
Katherine Chrystal Herne was born on June 17, 1882 in the Ashmont section of Dorchester, Massachussets, a town since annexed by Boston. She was the second of four children--three daughters followed by a son--of James A. Herne and Katharine (Corcoran) Herne, both well-known actors and both of Irish descent.
For several years after their marriage, the couple trouped across the country together, and when Herne began his career as a playwright, he wrote almost all of the female leads for his wife. The success of his melodrama Hearts of Oak made possible the comfortable suburban home in Ashmont where Chrystal spent her first nine years, until the family moved to New York City.
Her parents were avid readers of the best authors of the period--William Dean Howells, Henry James, Tolstoy, and Thomas Hardy, among others. Hamlin Garland, then a drama critic in Boston, was a frequent visitor and introduced the Hernes to the dramas of the European realists Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Hermann Sudermann. It was during these years that Chrystal was drawn to the works of George Bernard Shaw; she later starred in many of his plays.
In 1891 Chrystal and her sister Julie distributed placards in Boston announcing their father's new play, Margaret Fleming, the first example of Ibsenesque realism on the American stage. The writing of the play and its production greatly excited her parents, and their more than usual attention to the play stimulated her interest. Listening to her mother rehearse the part of Margaret, she early learned the importance of an actor's "reading" of a line - how the wrong emphasis could be as fatal as a false note by a singer.
Education
Herne's formal education ended before she reached high school, but her home life was intellectually stimulating to an unusual degree.
Career
In 1899 Herne first acted in her father's plays The Reverend Griffith Davenport and Sag Harbor. She attracted the attention of producers. In 1902, a year after her father died, she played Gertrude in E. H. Sothern's production of Hamlet, and in 1903, the part of Huguette in If I Were King. She later appeared with Nat Goodwin in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Her first engagement as a leading lady came in November 1903, in Clyde Fitch's Major André. Her intellectual depth and sophistication made her the inevitable choice of Arnold Daly to play leading roles in a series of Shaw's plays that he introduced to the American public in 1905-1906: Candida, You Never Can Tell, John Bull's Other Island, and the then-sensational Mrs. Warren's Profession. Critics attributed much of the success of Daly's financially hazardous venture to the ability of his leading lady to project Shaw's intellectually daring women.
Almost every season thereafter she played a leading part in a prominent play, among them Vera Ravendal in Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot (1908), Mrs. Clayton in Augustus Thomas' As a Man Thinks (1911), and Lady Grayston in Somerset Maugham's Our Betters (1917).
She won the acclaim of critics and public alike in George Kelly's Craig's Wife. But Kelly's work lacked the breadth, depth, and wit of Shaw, and the tragedy of Chrystal Herne's career was that her great talent was wasted during her later years on inferior plays. Her last appearance was in the role of Beatrice Crandall in A Room in Red and White (1936).
She was stricken with cancer and died at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
(CHRYSTAL HERNE The early 1900s stage actress and daughter...)
Personality
Herne learned the value of good diction and the art of expressing emotion through suggestion, keeping gestures and facial expressions to a minimum. Her exceptional training, combined with her beauty and grace, attracted the attention of producers.
Connections
In Los Angeles, on August 31, 1914, Herne married Harold Stanley Pollard, chief editoral writer for the New York Evening World, and spent much of her later years at their country home in Harvard, Massachussets. They had no children.