Katharine Cornell was an American actress, producer, and theatrical manager.
Background
Katharine Cornell was born on February 16, 1893 in Berlin, Germany. She was the only child of Peter Cortelyn Cornell, a physician, and Alice Gardner Plimpton, socially prominent residents of Buffalo, New York. They returned there in July 1893. In 1901, Dr. Cornell ceased practicing medicine to co-own and manage a local theater. Young Katharine's desire to devote her life to the stage came after seeing Maude Adams fly as Peter Pan in 1907 and watching, "day in and day out, " actress/manager Jessie Bonstelle's rehearsals for summer-stock seasons at her father's theater. Bonstelle encouraged her and later offered Cornell her first acting opportunities.
Education
Sent to Oaksmere finishing school, in Mamaroneck, New York, fifteen-year-old Katharine was an active athlete and wrote, directed, and acted in school plays.
Career
Director Edward Goodman of the Washington Square Players invited Cornell to contact him in Manhattan.
In 1911 Cornell toured Europe with an aunt, returning to Oaksmere to coach drama and athletics for five years. Financially independent at her mother's death in 1915, she moved to New York City with her aunt, attending rehearsals and understudying at the Washington Square Players. In her New York "debut" at twenty-three (in November 1916), substituting for a sick actress, she spoke four words in Bushido.
She acted minor roles for two years, the Players paying her $40 for the 1917-1918 season. Then Jessie Bonstelle offered thirty-two weeks of stock, acting small parts at $50 per week, the first of three seasons doing a new play every week in Detroit and Buffalo that Cornell later credited with giving her discipline and teaching her the business. After the first summer, Bonstelle got Cornell an audition as a replacement in the third road company of The Man Who Came Back.
Always poor at sight-reading, she was allowed a week's rehearsal with the stage manager, but after auditioning, was asked to play the same day's matinee; the sudden assignment may have overcome the extreme nervousness before a performance that plagued Cornell all her life; in any case, she "loved" her first touring experience. Following a second stock season, Bonstelle cast her as Jo in a British production of Little Women: Cornell's much-praised London debut was November 20, 1919. Then back to Detroit, alternating with Bonstelle as leading woman in her third stock season, for which Guthrie McClintic had been hired as director. He replaced Bonstelle as Cornell's artistic mentor, and they fell in love. Cornell attracted good notices in her first Broadway role in Rachel Crothers's Nice People.
In 1923, she played hoydenish Mary Fitton, the "dark lady" in William Shakespeare (January 1), inhibited Laura Pennington in The Enchanted Cottage (March 31), and both the libertine's mistress and her own daughter in Casanova (September 26). In 1924, she portrayed a "pathological psychology" in The Way Things Happen directed by McClintic (January 28), then a painfully crippled girl and "a horrible woman" in other brief runs. Meantime, with the noncommercial Actor's Theatre, she revealed a lighter side as Shaw's Candida (December 12). The special matinees drew critical acclaim and popular demand, prompting a five-month commercial run.
Eugene Speicher painted her famous portrait in this role she would later revive. "Carnal, doomed" Iris March in Michael Arlen's sensational The Green Hat (1925) returned her to the "tarnished ladies" in "trash of a violent kind" who brought her early fame and popularity; similar sensations followed in The Letter (1927), The Age of Innocence (1928), and Dishonored Lady (1930). In 1930, as a directing gift for McClintic, Cornell acquired Rudolf Besier's The Barretts of Wimpole Street, profoundly altering their lives. Her longtime friend Stanton Griffis decided that Cornell should produce Barretts herself.
With fellow-admirer A. Conger Goodyear, Griffis, who was a stockbroker, invested $27, 000 to form Cornell and McClintic Productions, Inc. , asking only for this original amount if Barretts succeeded, but requiring all profits to be used exclusively for future C. & M. C. productions. Cornell's personal factotum Gertrude Macy, named General Manager, bought 10 percent of the company for $3, 000.
Cornell, directed by McClintic, began a new career as the last great actress/manager in the American theater. Over twenty-nine years, a span exceeded only by the Theatre Guild and the Shuberts, Cornell and McClintic mounted twenty-four productions in New York City and revived "the road" through nationwide tours. The McClintics lived at Beekman Place in New York City, later moving across the Hudson to the New Jersey Palisades.
Cornell's most extraordinary tour came in 1933 and 1934: covering more than 16, 000 miles, playing to half a million people in seventy-seven cities, giving 225 performances in twenty-nine weeks, divided among The Barretts, Candida, and Romeo and Juliet. Then, in New York, each play was given a limited run; Saint Joan completed this remarkable sequence. Cornell often toured either after Broadway runs or before opening in New York.
Among the memorable roles she played were the tragic Oparre in The Wingless Victory (1936), Linda Esterbrook in No Time for Comedy (1939), Jennifer Dubedat in The Doctor's Dilemma (1941), and Masha in The Three Sisters (1942).
She toured The Barretts for U. S. troops in World War II (August 1944 - February 1945), bringing it back to Broadway in March. She starred in Anouilh's modern Antigone (1946), Antony and Cleopatra (1947), The Prescott Proposals (1953), and The Dark Is Light Enough (1955). Cornell made two television appearances: in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Producers Showcase, NBC, 1956) and There Shall Be No Night (Hallmark Hall of Fame, NBC, 1957). On film, she appeared briefly in Stage Door Canteen (1943) and narrated the documentary Helen Keller in Her Story (1954).
She recorded Sonnets from the Portuguese and The Barretts of Wimpole Street for Caedmon Records.
After the 1951 Broadway revival and tour of The Constant Wife, its highest-grossing and last success, the corporation's money was exhausted by a series of box-office failures. Cornell last appeared as Mrs. Patrick Campbell in Dear Liar (two tours and Broadway, 1959 and 1960).
Guthrie McClintic died on October 29, 1961, and Cornell never returned to work. She died at age eighty-one at her home, "Chip Chop, " on Martha's Vineyard.
(9" x 6"; 361 pages. With 32 pages of photographs.)
book
Views
Quotations:
"Getting started in the theatre still has a great element of luck in it, of course. Some producer must see the right person at just the right time. To get that kind of break, a girl has got to keep pounding away and tramp the streets from one manager's office to another, no matter how discouraging it may be. At the same time, she must remember that when the break does come, she must have the equipment necessary to capitalise on it. I get the impression that most of the young girls who come to me for parts simply haven't worked hard enough. In New York they have every chance in the world to round out their education in their spare time. At the galleries along 57th Street they can see the best pictures in all the world. They can hear the finest music. They can get the best books in inexpensive editions. Best of all, they can listen to the finest actors and actresses of the day. When they tell me that they can't afford to go to the theatre very often, I usually find they think it beneath their dignity to sit in the top balcony!''
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"It is a simple statement of the truth. There was a part of her that indeed preferred trash of a violent kind. Her integrity as an artist was the only defense such a preference needed. Every performance had to be as much a revelation of herself as it was an interpretation of a role, and therefore her choice of roles and the way she played them offer great insights into her nature, greater perhaps than can be inferred from her gracious, smiling, always agreeable, and increasingly guarded behavior offstage. One must look at her performances as one looks at the output of a writer or a painter. "
Connections
She married Guthrie McClintic on September 8, 1921.
Recipient art citation National Conference Christians and Jews, 1946. Medal of Freedom, 1946. Woman of Year award American Friends Hebrew University, 1959.tempSpaceMedal for good speech on stage, American Academy Arts and Letters, 1959.
Recipient art citation National Conference Christians and Jews, 1946. Medal of Freedom, 1946. Woman of Year award American Friends Hebrew University, 1959.tempSpaceMedal for good speech on stage, American Academy Arts and Letters, 1959.