Background
James Keteltas Hackett was born on September 6, 1869, on Wolfe Island, Ontario, Canada, the son of James Henry and Clara C. (Morgan) Hackett. Two years later his father died, so the son never saw him act.
James Keteltas Hackett was born on September 6, 1869, on Wolfe Island, Ontario, Canada, the son of James Henry and Clara C. (Morgan) Hackett. Two years later his father died, so the son never saw him act.
As a youth, Hackett appeared often in amateur theatricals, and on entering the College of the City of New York with the class of 1891, he became a leading figure in college plays. He founded in 1888 the City College Dramatic Society, served as its manager and leading actor, and throughout his college course received prizes for declamation of poetry and oratory. He then studied law for a few months after leaving college.
James Hackett made his début as François in The Broken Seal, with A. M. Palmer’s stock company, at the Park Theatre, Philadelphia, March 28, 1892. He joined Lotta Crabtree soon after, as her leading man, and then became briefly a member of Daly’s company in New York but left it to star in a road tour during the season of 1893-1894, playing The Private Secretary, The Arabian Nights, and Mixed Pickles.
Then Hackett joined the Queen’s Theatre Stock Company in Montreal, coming again to New York in January 1895 to play the Count de Neipperg in Madame Sans-Gene and later to support Kyrle Bellew and Mrs. James Brown Potter. In November 1895, Hackett joined the Lyceum Stock Company, Frohman having kept an eye on him ever since his college days, and on February 10, 1896, he took E. H. Sothern’s place in The Prisoner of Zenda, the reigning romantic drama of the day. Sothern had gone on tour in this play, and Hackett, after going to Boston to study the other’s methods of make up and rapid changes, stepped into his shoes in the New York cast. His popular success was great, and Frohman made him leading man of the stock company following the resignation of Herbert Kelcey.
While with the Lyceum company, Hackett created the roles in America of George Lamorant in Pinero’s The Princess and the Butterfly and Nigel Stanyon in R. C. Carton’s The Tree of Knowledge. The latter play he took on tour as a star but soon abandoned it for Anthony Hope’s Rupert of Hentzau, produced November 21, 1898, in Philadelphia. The Hope romance was temporarily shelved while Hackett played Mercutio in a production of Romeo and Juliet with Maude Adams and William Faversham in the name parts. All three players lacked proper training for such roles, and the elaborate revival failed.
Hackett thereupon returned to romance, taking Rupert of Hentzau across the continent. To the Zenda tale he added The Pride of Jennico, adapted from a novel by Agnes and Egerton Castle, in 1900, and Don Caesar’s Return, by Victor Mapes, in 1901. In 1902 Hackett appeared in a dramatic version of The Crisis, then a “best seller, ” in an effort to get away, if possible, from the romantic school in which he had been reared. But on December 6, 1904, he courted favor in The Fortunes of the King, a romantic melodrama about Charles II.
In the autumn of 1905, however, at the Savoy Theatre, New York, Hackett produced and acted with much success Alfred Sutro’s social drama, The Walls of Jericho, his wife playing with him, and the success of the venture was sufficient to enable him to rent a theatre on West Forty-second Street, New York, renaming it the Hackett, and to branch out into management, as his father had attempted to do almost seventy-five years before. But like his father, he was by no means always successful. He failed to attract patronage with Sutro’s John Glayde’s Honor, in 1907-1908, and by September 1908 he was once more emerging at his own theatre in a revival of The Prisoner of Zenda - already an out-moded play. Among other productions were Craig Kennedy, John Ermine of Yellowstone, and The Bishop’s Candlesticks.
In 1914 he inherited, rather unexpectedly, a large fortune, said at the time to be $1, 200, 000. This was left to him by his niece, Mrs. Millicent Hackett Trowbridge of New York, daughter of his half-brother and older than he. She did not approve nor like him, it was reported, but died intestate, and he was next of kin. Relieved by this good fortune of financial worries, he was able to further his personal ambitions and at once produced Othello (1914), following it with a production of Macbeth which was shown at the Criterion Theatre, New York, in 1916, with sets by Joseph Urban. The “new stage-craft” was then comparatively strange to America, nor was it fully grasped by Hackett himself. None the less, this production was arresting in many ways and marked a step forward in scenic development in America.
During the ensuing war years Hackett was conspicuous for his performances of Out There and The Better ’Ole. After the war, in November 1919, he appeared with the Theatre Guild in New York in the name Part of The Rise of Silas Lapham, adapted from Howells’s novel. In 1920 he took his production of Macbeth to London and later to the Odéon in Haris, where it was well received.
He did not again act in America, though he returned to the United States in 1924. In November 1926 he acted a scene from Macbeth before the King, at Drury Lane, but illness forced him to Paris for treatment, and he died in that city on November 8, 1926.
As a young man Hackett was tall and straight and virile of figure, with dark hair, firm chin, and sharply chiseled features. His early development came at a time when romantic melodrama was the vogue, and he developed the dashing and picturesque appearance and somewhat artificial pose of that artificial type of play. He did it well and became a matinée idol. When ambition led him to more serious impersonations, lack of voice training was obvious in the classics, and his lack of simplicity, naturalness, and emotional sincerity in modern works. He was sometimes harsh, dry, and stilted.
In November 1896, while acting in The Courtship of Leonie with a new leading woman, Mary Mannering, recently from England, he fell in love with her, and on May 2, 1897, married her. In 1910 Mary Mannering divorced Hackett, and in 1911 he married Beatrice H. Beckley, of London, who had been his leading woman.