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Mary Anderson was an American actress, billed as Mary Navarro during her silent film career.
Background
Mary Anderson was born Mary Antoinette Anderson on July 28, 1859 in Sacramento, California, United States, the older of two children and the only daughter of Charles H. and Antonia (Leugers) Anderson. Her father, a young Englishman, was frequently away from home on trips to England, and in 1860 her mother, a Philadelphian and a Roman Catholic of German descent, moved to Louisville, Kentucky, to be near an uncle, Anthony Müller, a Franciscan priest.
Charles H. Anderson became an officer in the Confederate Army and was killed early in the Civil War. His widow subsequently married Dr. Hamilton Griffin, a Louisville surgeon, by whom she had two children, Mary Anderson's half-brother and half-sister.
Education
Growing up in Louisville, Mary was educated there at the Ursuline Convent and the Academy of the Presentation Nuns.
Attendance at performances by the actor Edwin Booth fired her with the ambition to go on the stage, and at fourteen she left school and began memorizing prominent roles. Though her mother at first disapproved, Mary was encouraged by her stepfather, who had once been an amateur actor, and it was through him that she obtained a chance to read for the famous actress Charlotte Cushman. At her suggestion Mary was sent for several months' study with George Vandenhoff in New York.
Career
On November 27, 1875, Anderson made her first stage appearance at a benefit performance at Macauley's Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky in the role of Shakespeare's Juliet. Her favorable reception led to a week's engagement early the next year, her roles being Juliet, Bianca in Fazio, Julia in The Hunchback, the title role in Richard Lalor Sheil's Evadne, and Pauline in The Lady of Lyons. Later that year she obtained engagements in St. Louis and New Orleans; in the latter city she added the role of Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering to her repertoire and scored a personal triumph.
After touring the Middle West and South with continuing success, she made her New York debut on November 12, 1877, at the Fifth Avenue Theatre as Pauline in The Lady of Lyons. The metropolitan critics and audience confirmed the judgment of the road public, to whom she had become "our Mary, " and she was firmly established as a star. A successful series of engagements in New York followed, and long tours in her own company.
On September 18, 1883, she made her debut in London at the Lyceum Theatre as Parthenia in Ingomar, one of her most popular roles. Her acclaim there was even greater than in her own country. She played Galatea and Juliet with equal success and was invited to play Rosalind at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon.
In 1885 she returned to New York with her London company and with Johnston Forbes-Robertson as her leading man. This American tour, which carried her all the way across the country to California, was a complete triumph.
Back in London in 1887 she appeared in the dual roles of Hermione and Perdita in A Winter's Tale, which ran for the amazing total of 164 performances. She brought the production to New York in the fall of 1888 and subsequently took it on tour.
Her successful career, however, came to a sudden end. One night in March 1889, while appearing in Washington, D. C. , at the time of President Harrison's inauguration, she collapsed on the stage with a severe case of nervous prostration. Disbanding the company, she retired from the theatre--although still only thirty--and sailed soon afterward for England, where she was to live for the rest of her life.
She emerged from retirement only once, during World War I, when she revived Comedy and Tragedy and two of her other famous roles for the benefit of wartime charities. Her only other theatrical activity of later years was to collaborate with the novelist Robert S. Hichens in dramatizing his The Garden of Allah.
Achievements
Anderson's popularity rested in great part on her exceptional beauty and highly successful publicity.
The heroine of E. G. Benson's "Lucia" stories is said to be a thinly veiled portrait of Mary Anderson during her years of retirement, and she is reportedly the prototype also of the heroine of William Black's novel, Strange Adventures of a House-Boat.
Land donated by Anderson in Mount St. Francis, Indiana to the Conventual Franciscan Friars is now the Mount Saint Francis Center for Spirituality.
Anderson was a devout Roman Catholic; she had a chapel built in her attic, with stained-glass windows designed by Paul Woodroffe.
Personality
A tall girl with a statuesque figure, Mary Anderson had exquisite features softened in their regularity by a cloud of golden-brown hair. George C. D. Odell, historian of the New York stage, called her the most beautiful woman he ever saw.
Her voice was clear, smooth, silvery, ranging through many moods, from the ripple of arch, bewitching mirth to the low moan of anguish, the deep whisper of passion or the clarion note of power. She filled the scene with her presence, and she filled the hearts of her audience with a conviction of the possible loveliness and majesty of the human soul.
Mary Anderson refused to act in plays that, in her own words, "drag one through the mire of immorality even when they show a good lesson in the end, " and as a result most of her vehicles, other than the classics, were somewhat old-fashioned and outmoded. Yet almost all of her contemporaries were impressed by the quality of her performances, which seemed to have grasped each character by intuition, to have entered into it bodily and lived it without conscious volition.
Her friendships over the years included such eminent persons as Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Longfellow, Tennyson, and Sir William S. Gilbert; Gilbert wrote the play Comedy and Tragedy especially for her.
Quotes from others about the person
William Winter: "Certain tones in her voice, --so thrilling, so full of wild passion and inexpressible melancholy, --went straight to the heart and brought tears into the eyes. "
Connections
On June 17, 1890, Mary Anderson married Antonio F. de Navarro, who had practised law in New York and became a barrister in England. They had two children, a son, José M. , and a daughter, Elena; an earlier son had died at birth. At their home, Court Farm, at Broadway, Worcestershire, England, Miss Anderson was a noted hostess.
