Background
Nathaniel Carl Goodwin was born on July 25, 1857, in Boston. He was the son of Nathaniel Carll and Caroline (Hinkel) Goodwin.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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Nathaniel Carl Goodwin was born on July 25, 1857, in Boston. He was the son of Nathaniel Carll and Caroline (Hinkel) Goodwin.
Goodwin's early education was at the Abbott school for boys on the Little Blue Estate in Farmington, Maine.
He was then apprenticed to a Boston dry-goods house but spent much time cultivating a natural gift for mimicry and haunting the theatres. Finally, his father let him study with an old actor in Boston, Stuart Robson.
Stuart Robson got Goodwin a job as Ned the newsboy in Lazv in New York, at the Howard Athenaeum, Boston, where he first appeared in 1873. He also gave his imitations of other actors.
Goodwin next went to New York, and in 1875 and 1876 appeared in vaudeville at Tony Pastor’s and elsewhere. He was also cast in The Littlest Rebel with Minnie Palmer, and in Evangeline.
With his wife, Eliza Weatherby, an actress, Goodwin appeared in a series of burlesque entertainments known as Froliques, acted in The Black Flag at the Union Square Theatre, and played for a short time with Harri- gan and Hart.
He was engaged as low comedian for the Cincinnati Dramatic Festival, in 1883, playing such roles as the grave-digger in Hamlet. Others in the company were Barrett, McCullough, and Mary Anderson. This established his reputation, and in the following decade, he starred successfully in a series of light comedies, farces, and musical pieces.
His greatest success at this time was A Gilded Fool, by Henry Guy Carleton.
He revived David Garrick, and in 1896, he was Sir Lucius in Jefferson’s famous “all-star” revival of The Rivals. He made a tour to Australia, taking with him Maxine Elliott as his leading woman.
With Miss Elliott, as co-star, he made a series of productions which were among the most successful of his career, including especially The Cowboy and the Lady, and Nathan Hale by Clyde Fitch (1899), and When We Were Twenty-One by H. V. Esmond (1900). In 1901 he produced The Merchant of Venice, at the Knickerbocker Theatre, New York, acting Shylock to Miss Elliott’s Portia. The production was ambitious, but the play lay beyond the powers of either star and was a failure.
Shortly thereafter, Miss Elliott went her own way as an independent star, and Goodwin never again succeeded in recapturing the success of his earlier days.
In 1904, he played Bottom in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which opened the New Amsterdam Theatre, New York, and in 1912, after a series of failures, he came back to New York as Fagin in an “all-star” revival of Oliver Twist.
Otherwise, his appearances were artistically negligible during these years, though the plays produced included Jacobs’s Beauty and the Barge, Alfred Henry Lewis’s Wolfville, and The Genius by the De Mille brothers.
In 1918, he returned to the New York stage, not as a star but merely as one member of the company playing Jesse Lynch Williams’s comedy, Why Marry? Under the restraint of another’s management, he gave a brilliant and delightful performance, and when the play went on tour he was everywhere warmly acclaimed.
But due to the shock of the removal of his right eye some months earlier, his system had broken down, and he died rather suddenly, on the morning of January 31, 1919.
His popularity “on the road” was still so great that the play Why Marry? hitherto successful, no longer attracted, and the tour had to be closed.
He was buried from the home of his aged parents, in Roxbury, Massachusets.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
In his childhood, Goodwin was a “slight, delicate youth, with peculiar flaxen hair, round blue eyes, and a complexion as fair as a girl’s”.
In his autobiographical book, he sets forth his various marital difficulties, which in this case, according to his account, included the pursuit of his wife to London in quest of his watch.
The New York Evening Post spoke of Goodwin as “wayward, impulsive and reckless. ”
He was of medium stature, with blue eyes, a wide, merry mouth, and a genial wit, in his early years he was equally attractive as an entertainer on or off the stage, and this perhaps was his undoing, since it led him to take his stage career too lightly, while his social life became too prominent.
Once, in Brooklyn, he appeared intoxicated on the stage, so the play had to be stopped, and the next night he was forced publicly to apologize.
During the early days of his marriage with Miss Elliott, they maintained a lavish summer home at Shooters Hill, Kent, England. One cannot escape a certain sympathy with this genial, easy-going, and democratic actor amid the alien guests his beautiful and socially aspiring wife gathered into their home.
The situation contained more elements of the genuine satirical comedy than most of the plays he put upon the stage. In later years, Goodwin was broken by his failures in Shakespearian roles for which he had never really prepared himself; his constant and publicly aired matrimonial difficulties did his serious reputation no good, and he became coarsened both in face and figure.
The publication of his amusing but tasteless book in 1914 did not help matters. But he never quite lost the affections of those who had known him as the delightful comedian of the eighties and nineties, and when his last role was one of dignity and distinction, in a brilliant modern comedy, there was general rejoicing.
On June 24, 1877, Goodwin married Eliza Weatherby, an actress who had come to America with the Lydia Thompson Blondes. She died in 1887.
In October 1888, he had married Mrs. Nellie Baker Pease of Buffalo, but the union had not been successful and divorce proceedings were underway when he left for Australia.
There was much baseless but unpleasant gossip in the newspapers, and after his return to America, on February 20, 1898, he married Miss Elliott.
In 1908, Miss Elliott was divorced from Goodwin, and on November 8, 1908, in Boston, he married Edna Goodrich, who was then his leading woman. In 1911, she secured a divorce.
On May 24, 1913, he was married to Marjorie Moreland and was divorced from her in 1918.
Goodwin was said to be about to marry for the sixth time when he died.
31 October 1833 - 7 June 1924
26 November 1838 - 18 February 1923
23 March 1863 - 17 February 1905
5 February 1868 - 5 March 1940
Died on 2 September 1902.
1849 - 24 March 1887
22 December 1883 - 26 May 1971
