William DeWolf Hopper was an American actor, singer and comedian. He starred on numerous stages of vaudeville and musical theaters.
Background
William DeWolf Hopper was born on March 30, 1858 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of John Hopper и Rosalie DeWolf. His father, who died when the boy was six, was the son of Isaac Tatum Hopper; his mother came from a family prominent in Rhode Island.
Hopper was christened William D'Wolf, but he later dropped the first name and modified the form of the second.
Career
When Hopper was fifteen, "Willie, " as he was then called, acted Ralph Roister Doister for a church benefit but had no thought of a stage career. Instead he presently entered the office of his father's friend, Joseph H. Choate, to read law. When he was twenty, however, his acting in an amateur show attracted a manager's attention, and his indulgent mother gave him money to finance a road tour in Our Boys, Freaks, and Caste. A year later he came into his inheritance and used it up in the next three years, financing his own company. By that time all thought of the law was gone, to the relief of Choate, as he said.
Appearing briefly with Harrigan and Hart and studying singing for several months, he was then engaged to play Pittacus Green in a road company of Hazel Kirke (1883) and then to play in May Blossom at the Madison Square Theatre. Here he sang a song that led Colonel John McCaull to engage him for light opera. His first role was comic, though his ambition then was toward grand opera, and, he always declared, he was "ticketed for life. " He sang for McCaull for five years and built up a reputation as an eccentric comedian with a fine bass voice.
He recited "Casey at the Bat" for the first time at Wallack's Theatre, May 13, 1888. The New York Giants and Chicago White Sox were to be in the house that night, so the manager, who had been given the poem clipped from a newspaper, gave it to Hopper to insert into the program. Hopper learned it in twenty minutes. Three years later he used it as a curtain speech in Wang, and from then on he was forced to recite it at practically every performance he ever gave. Late in life he reckoned that he had recited it not less than 10, 000 times. When his voice, at "the multitude was awed, " went down to B flat below low C, the effect was indescribable.
In 1890 he became a star in Castles in the Air, and the next year he produced the musical comedy that made him famous--Wang, by J. Cheever Goodwin and Woolson Morse. It was in Wang that he set forth in song the plight of the man with an elephant on his hands. After Wang came Panjandrum, Dr. Syntax, and Sousa's El Capitan (1896) which ran for two years and in 1899 was taken to London.
In 1900 and 1901 Hopper was one of the company at Weber and Fields Music Hall, but he returned to comic opera in 1902 in Mr. Pickwick. This was followed by Happy Land, with music by De Koven, The Pied Piper, and others. In 1911 he sang Dick Deadeye in Pinafore, his first appearance in Gilbert and Sullivan, and continued with these works for several seasons, until he had sung twelve different roles. The jester in Yeoman of the Guard was his favorite because it gave him opportunity for pathos. He brought to these timeless operettas a rich voice and remarkably clear enunciation, as well as humor. The difficult "nightmare song" in Iolanthe, in which he did not miss a syllable, he is said to have have memorized in an hour and twenty minutes.
In 1915, with other stage stars, he went to Hollywood at a large salary and made two pictures. But he was not successful on the screen. In 1918 he was playing Bill, the amusing Cockney, in The Better 'Ole, and two years later he joined with Francis Wilson in a revival of Erminie. He was now a man over sixty, in the postwar world which had substituted reviews for operettas, and the remaining years of his life were barren of Broadway triumphs and devoted largely to road tours in Gilbert and Sullivan and The Student Prince, even to a revival (1932) of a popular-priced melodrama, The Monster.
With the aid of Wesley Winans Stout, Hopper wrote some amusing reminiscences. They appeared serially in the Saturday Evening Post and in book form in 1927 under the title, Once a Clown, Always a Clown. He also had many radio engagements. It was during a radio engagement at Kansas City that he died in 1935. The funeral, at the Little Church Around the Corner in New York, was attended by a great throng.
Achievements
Personality
Hopper was well over six feet tall, with a powerful, rich, and deep bass voice, and the comic unction of a born clown.
Connections
Hopper's wives were, in order: his cousin Helen Gardner, the daughter of his mother's sister; Ida Mosher, by whom he had one son, John; Edna Wallace; Nella (or Eleanor) Reardon Bergen; Elda Furry, known on the stage as Hedda Hopper, by whom he had one son, William DeWolf; and Mrs. Lillian Glaser, who survived him. All marriages but the first and last were terminated by what appears to have been amicable divorce.