Margaret Anglin, born Mary Warren Anglin, was a Canadian-born Broadway actress, director and producer. At the peak of her career, she was one of the leading stage actresses in the world.
Background
Margaret Anglin was born on April 3, 1876 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the daughter of Timothy Warren Anglin, speaker of the House of Commons, and Ellen A. McTavish.
Anglin showed an early interest in theater, and by the time she was fifteen had decided to become a professional concert reader. Although her father did not approve of such a career, she evidently had the support of her mother, who secretly financed her way to New York City to study elocution.
Education
Anglin was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, in Montreal.
In New York City, at seventeen, she became one of the first pupils in Nelson Wheatcroft's Empire Dramatic School.
Career
Anglin got her first opportunity in theater from Charles Frohman. Having promised to engage the four most promising students of Wheatcroft's school, Frohman found himself particularly pleased with Anglin and cast her as Madeline West in his production of Bronson Howard's Shenandoah at New York's Academy of Music in 1894.
Eager for greater challenges, however, she left Frohman's management, frustrated by the trivial parts assigned her, and became a member of James O'Neill's company for the 1896-1897 season, playing Ophelia in Hamlet, Virginia in Sheridan Knowles's Virginius, and Mercedes in O'Neill's version of The Count of Monte Cristo. The following season she played Meg in Lord Chumley, co-starring with E. H. Sothern. These were Margaret Anglin's apprentice years.
When, in the fall of 1898, Richard Mansfield engaged her to play Roxane in Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, she began to attract attention. Within a year she was playing leading roles in Frohman's stock company, pleasing audiences with Mrs. Dane in Henry Arthur Jones's Mrs. Dane's Defence and as Dora in Sardou's Diplomacy.
For the next four seasons she played in Henry Miller's stock company in San Francisco, most notably opposite Miller in The Devil's Disciple and Camille.
During the 1905-1906 season she contracted with the Shubert organization and starred in the title role of Zira in a play adapted from Wilkie Collins' The New Magdalen.
By the first decade of the twentieth century American dramatists were beginning to extricate themselves from the tangle of spectacular melodrama and farce that had limited their creativity in the nineteenth century.
Helping to bring America into the world of modern drama, William Vaughan Moody wrote The Great Divide, in which Margaret Anglin, as Ruth Jordan, costarred with Henry Miller. A substantial acting success, their engagement opened in New York at the Princess Theatre on October 3, 1906, and ran through 1908. "Never, " wrote the critic for the New York Sun (October 4, 1906), had Miss Anglin "been more poignantly emotional. "
The damp lace handkerchief of the anguishing heroine seemed always in her hands until suddenly, in 1909, after a very successful run of The Awakening of Helena Richie, Anglin announced that she wanted to play comedy. Within months willing playwrights deluged her with 420 comedies, one of which was Green Stockings, in which she starred in 1911.
After showing a special aptitude for refined comedy in The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere's Fan, Anglin turned actress-manager in 1913 and presented Shakespeare in repertory: The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Anthony and Cleopatra.
In 1915 she produced Antigone and Electra of Sophocles and Iphigenia in Aulis and Medea of Euripides at the Greek Theater of the University of California at Berkeley, appearing in the major female roles while directing and supervising the productions. Six years later she repeated the role of Clytemnestra in Iphigenia in Aulis in a memorable production at the Manhattan Opera House with Walter Damrosch conducting a musical accompaniment he had composed for the occasion.
During a period of great turbulence in American theater history, when the Shuberts challenged the control of the Theatrical Syndicate, she was able to act for both agencies. When Actors' Equity voted to strike in August 1919, she opposed the action and supported the Actors' Fidelity League.
Her last Broadway appearance was as Lady Mary Crabbe in Fresh Fields in 1936. Seven years later, after a forty-year career in which she estimated that she had acted in eighty plays, she gave her final performance in a road company production of Watch on the Rhine.
She died in Toronto in 1958.
Achievements
Religion
Anglin was raised a Catholic and remained so during her life.
Personality
Critics invariably described her as a powerful emotional actress with a voice that "throbs and sobs. " Anglin had her own "the witchcraft of simplicity, " extracting that richness of interpretation which delighted audiences. She was also a strong woman with definite ideas and would stop a performance until a noisy audience quieted down.
Not strikingly beautiful but graceful and charming, she been described as "a warmth of human nature. "
Connections
On May 8, 1911 she married Howard Hull, an author and playwright who became her manager.