Robert Bruce Mantell was of Scottish ancestry and birth. He was the son of James and Elizabeth Bruce Mantell. Robert Bruce was born on 7 February 1854 in the Wheatsheaf Inn, at Irvine in Ayrshire, of which his father was the landlord, and was one of a family of four sons and four daughters. At the age of five he was taken to Belfast, where his father established himself as an inn-keeper, and there after receiving a brief schooling, he made his first tentative experiments in amateur theatricals.
Career
Mantell's début in a theatre, following appearances in halls, was in 1873 at the Theatre Royal, Belfast, as De Mauprat in Richelieu. The law was his first intended destiny, but it was given up soon in favor of an apprenticeship in the wholesale liquor business until he was nineteen, when he made up his mind, in spite of maternal objections, to become an actor. He called himself then, and he was known to the public for some time, as Robert Hudson. In May 1874 he worked his way to America as a steward on a steamship of which his brother was purser, and landing in Boston, he sought ineffectually for an engagement as an actor in the theatres of that city. Only ten days were sufficient to discourage him, and he returned to Belfast. His career on the stage actually began Oct. 21, 1876, when he secured the small part of the Sergeant in Dion Boucicault's Arrah-na-Pogue with a stock company in Rochdale, England. Later he acted in support of Charles Mathews, Alice Marriott, Ellen Wallis, and other English stars, until, in October 1878, he set sail again for the United States under engagement to join Mme. Modjeska's company, making his début in America on November 18, 1878, at Albany, N. Y. , as Tybalt to the star's Juliet, playing then for the first time under his own name. At the end of the season he returned to England, where he passed several years of alternate hard work and lack of engagements. Coming back to the Unitd States, he acted variously and with little encouragement for about a year. Then, on October 1, 1883, he played with exceptional acclaim the part of Loris Ipanoff to Fanny Davenport's Fedora in Sardou's play of that name at the Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York, and continued in it for the entire season. He went to Scotland for the summer, and returning in the autumn he was henceforth identified with the American stage for over forty years. In the spring of 1885 he acted the title role in Steele MacKaye's Dakolar during the opening weeks of the new Lyceum Theatre in New York. A contemporary reviewer said that his characterization, "although rough at present, is a very powerful sketch, " and that "the young man's handsome presence, expressive face, fine voice, and physical vigor give him great advantages". Other engagements followed, including a return to the part of Loris Ipanoff with Fanny Davenport, but his desire to shine as a stellar attraction was soon foremost in his mind, and it did not subside until his ambition was realized. In 1886 he found himself at the head of his own company under the astute management of Augustus Pitou, playing in a romantic drama by John Kellar entitled Tangled Lives. The play itself was mediocre, but he gave it a wide popularity, and soon added The Marble Heart, The Corsican Brothers, Monbars, The Face in the Moonlight, and other melodramas new and old to his repertory, finally reaching the height of his ambition by devoting himself during his later years almost wholly to Shakespeare, with whose plays he had had abundant experience by acting secondary characters at intervals during many years. He first acted Romeo in 1887, Othello in 1888, Hamlet in 1890, Richard III in 1901, and so on through a Shakespearean repertory that also came to include Macbeth, Iago, Brutus, King John, Shylock, and King Lear. He died at his home in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey on 27 June 1928.
Achievements
Personality
Because of marital difficulties, which involved the payment of alimony, he was little known in the New York theatres for a decade, although he found a warm welcome in other large cities. In his younger days Mantell was handsome, graceful, and impassioned, his appeal being made more through the superficial phases of character interpretation dependent mainly upon force of action and vigor of voice than through intellectual subtlety. In his later days he became heavy, and he lacked the ability to carry the idea of inspiration and the illusion of reality across the footlights. His Shakespearean impersonations were studious, sturdy, and somewhat slow-moving. He was essentially a melodramatic and a romantic actor, and romance departed from him with the passing of his youth and his transition from middle to old age. In his last days on the stage he was hampered by lameness.
Connections
He was first married to Marie Sheldon, from whom he was divorced in 1893, second to Charlotte Behrens, third to Marie Booth Russell, and fourth to Genevieve Hamper, who survived him. All were at one time or another actresses and members of his companies, usually playing leading feminine characters in his support.