Background

Gillette was born on July 24, 1853, in Hartford, Connecticut, the fourth son and youngest of six children of Francis Gillette, reformer and United States Senator (1854-1855), and his wife, Elisabeth (or Eliza) Daggett Hooker. On his mother's side he was descended from the Rev. Thomas Hooker, one of the founders of Hartford.

Education

Brought up in his native town, Gillette early displayed histrionic talents by putting on plays in a toy theatre and later excelling as an orator at the Hartford High School. To the disappointment of his parents, he gave up college. In 1930 he was awarded honorary degrees by Yale, Columbia, and Trinity College, Hartford.

Career

In 1875 Gillette made his way to New Orleans, where he acted in Across the Continent in a stock company managed by Ben De Bar. On August 16, 1875, he appeared on the New York stage at the Union Square Theatre in Colonel Sellers (later produced as The Gilded Age), playing Duff, a small part that Mark Twain, a Hartford neighbor and co-author of the play, had obtained for him. On September 13 he acted the part of a bailiff in For Love or Money and that of Guzman in Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady at the Globe Theatre, Boston, where he remained during the season, appearing in a variety of Shakespearean and other roles. It was at this theatre, on February 2, 1876, that he scored his first success in the part of Prince Florian in W. S. Gilbert's Broken Hearts. After acting for a time with Bernard Macauley's company at Cincinnati and Louisville, he reappeared in New York in Colonel Sellers (as the Foreman of the Jury) at the Park Theatre, April 30, 1877, and on May 24, 1878, he played the Marquis de Presles in The Two Orphans at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At the Madison Square Theatre, New York, June 1, 1881, he took the title role in his own play, The Professor, which ran for 151 consecutive performances. With Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett he next wrote, but did not act in, Esmeralda (Madison Square Theatre, October 29, 1881), one of the great hits of that time. In 1883 and 1884 he toured as Douglas Winthrop in Young Mrs. Winthrop and then appeared at the New Comedy Theatre, New York, September 29, 1884, as the Rev. Job McCosh in Digby's Secretary, an adaptation by him of a German farce by Gustav von Moser. In 1886 his play concerning the heroism of a spy, Held by the Enemy, with the author in the role of the spy, Thomas Bean, was first given in Brooklyn (Criterion Theatre, February 22) and then with great success in New York (Madison Square Theatre, August 16, 1886) and London (Princess's Theatre, April 9, 1887). It has been called the first important drama of the Civil War. There followed She (Niblo's Garden, New York, November 29, 1887), a dramatization of Rider Haggard's novel; A Legal Wreck (Madison Square Theatre, August 14, 1888), an original play; and four adaptations. In 1893 the failure of Gillette's spectacular Ninety Days, written after he had just recovered from a serious illness and the loss of his wife, all but ruined him financially. However, he emerged courageously from retirement on his North Carolina estate to star in two of his greatest hits - Too Much Johnson (Standard Theatre, New York, November 26, 1894; Garrick Theatre, London, April 18, 1898), a farce in which he played Augustus Billings, and Secret Service (Garrick Theatre, New York, October 5, 1896; Adelphi Theatre, London, May 15, 1897), another Civil War melodrama, in which he appeared as the northern spy Lewis Dumont, alias Captain Thorne. After writing, but not performing in, Because She Loved Him So (Madison Square Theatre, January 16, 1899), an adaptation of a French comedy, he took the title role in Sherlock Holmes, an original play based on three of Conan Doyle's characters and first presented at the Star Theatre, Buffalo, October 23, 1899, then at the Garrick Theatre, New York, November 6, 1899, and later at the Lyceum Theatre, London, September 9, 1901, where it ran until April 1902 and was seen by Edward VII. This was his greatest success, and in the mind of the public his lean, handsome face, set off by a deerstalker cap, became identified with Doyle's famous creation. At the Lyceum Theatre, New York, Nov. 17, 1903, he appeared in Sir James M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton as Crichton, a part well suited to him, and at the Duke of York's Theatre, London, September 13, 1905, he played Dr. Carrington in his own play, Clarice, in which he afterward toured America. In all, Gillette wrote twenty full-length plays (acting in nine of them), but those after Clarice did not fit into the new age, and until his final retirement in 1936 he was usually seen in his early roles. His last performance of the part took place at Wilmington, Delaware, March 19, 1932. In 1935, at the age of eighty-two, he went on a second farewell tour, starring with Charles Coburn and James Kirkwood in Austin Strong's Three Wise Fools, and his last appearance on any stage occurred in this play at Hartford, February 27, 1936. In 1919, after his first retirement, Gillette built a twenty-four-room castle overlooking the Connecticut River at Hadlyme, Connecticut, with a three-mile miniature railway over which he enjoyed driving his guests. He died of pulmonary hemorrhage at Hartford and was buried in the Hooker family plot in Riverside Cemetery, Farmington, Connecticut.

Achievements

• Gillette was a famous actor, also notable for his written plays. He was a superlative actor in a range that was relatively narrow; and his own plays, chiefly melodramas and farces, were written to exploit his special talents. They almost invariably depicted him as the calm center of a whirlpool of either exciting or amusing complications.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869--1879

    ( According to William Gillette, recent reinterpretation ...)

  • Sherlock Holmes: A Comedy in Two Acts

    (Drama / Characters: 17 Male, 3 Female Scenery: 5 inter...)

  • Secret Service: A Romance of the Southern Confederacy (Classic Reprint)

    (Xigbt plot A cts I and IVS ame Foots and 1st Borders: Whi...)

  • Sherlock Holmes: A Play in Four Acts (Plays from the Victorian Stage)

    (The classic Victorian melodrama. All the intrigue and sus...)

  • Held by the Enemy

    (Historical reprint)

Membership

Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1913)

Personality

Gillette was a somewhat aloof, though not unfriendly, man, with a large share of New England reticence. The exponent of repression and understatement, laconic and soft-spoken to the point of inaudibility, he was yet able to hold the attention of an audience every moment, and no actor has ever been more eloquent in silence.

Quotes from others about the person

• "His acting, " wrote Walter Prichard Eaton, "was sometimes too cool for scenes requiring emotional fervor. He could not quite let himself go. He was always best in his own plays, where emotion was aroused by executive action, " and where both acting and dialogue were "free of the flamboyances which neither his mind nor his breeding could endure".

Connections

Gillette's wife, Helen Nickles, whom he had married on June 1, 1882, died childless in 1888.

Father:

Francis Gillette

Mother:

Elisabeth Daggett Hooker

Spouse:

Helen Nickles

References

• William Gillette, America's Sherlock Holmes
• Sherlock Holmes On Stage: A Collection of Classic Plays