Everything about Edwin Booth totally explained
Edwin Thomas Booth (
November 13,
1833 –
June 7,
1893), was a famous
19th century American actor. He was born near
Bel Air, Maryland into the
English American theatrical
Booth family. Booth toured throughout America and to the major capitals of Europe, performing Shakespeare; in 1869 he founded
Booth's Theatre in New York, a spectacular theatre that was quite modern for its time. Some theatre historians consider him the greatest American actor and
Hamlet of the 19th century. He was also the brother of
John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President
Abraham Lincoln.
Early life
Booth was the son of another famous actor,
Junius Brutus Booth, an Englishman, who named Edwin after
Edwin Forrest and
Thomas Flynn, two of Junius's colleagues. John Wilkes Booth, the assassin, was Edwin's younger brother and was also an actor. In an interesting coincidence, Edwin Booth saved Abraham Lincoln's son,
Robert, from serious injury or even death by pulling him up onto a train platform in
Jersey City after Robert had fallen.
Career
In his early appearances he usually performed alongside his father, making his stage debut as Tressel in
Richard III in
Boston, Massachusetts in 1849. Two years later, Edwin had his first starring role, standing in for his supposedly ailing father as Richard.
After his father's death in 1852, Booth went on a worldwide tour, visiting
Australia and
Hawaii, and finally gaining acclaim of his own during an engagement in
Sacramento, California in 1856.
Before his brother assassinated the president, Edwin had appeared with his two brothers John Wilkes and Junius Brutus Booth Jr. in
Julius Caesar in 1864. John Wilkes played Marc Antony, Edwin played Brutus, and Junius played Cassius. It was a benefit show and the first and last time that the brothers would appear together on the same stage. The funds were used to erect a statue of
William Shakespeare that still stands in
Central Park just south of the Prominade. Immediately following the brothers Booth played
Julius Caesar,
Edwin Booth commenced a production of
Hamlet on the same stage that came to be known as the "hundred nights
Hamlet", setting a record that lasted until
John Barrymore infamously broke the record in 1920, playing the Dane for 101 performances.
From 1863 to 1867, Booth managed the
Winter Garden Theater in
New York City, mostly staging
Shakespearean tragedies. In 1865, Booth purchased the
Walnut Street Theatre in
Philadelphia.
After
Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, the infamy associated with the Booth name forced Booth to abandon the stage for many months, a period dramatized in the 1955
Richard Burton movie
Prince of Players, which was adapted from the biography of the same name by Eleanor Ruggles (ISBN 0-8371-6529-6). He made his return to the stage at the
The Winter Garden Theatre in January 1866, playing the title role in
Hamlet. Hamlet would eventually become Booth's signature role.
In 1867, a fire damaged
The Winter Garden Theatre, resulting in the building's subsequent demolition.
Booth's Theatre
After the fire at
The Winter Garden Theatre, Booth built his own theatre, an elaborate structure called
Booth's Theatre in Manhattan, which opened on February 3, 1869 with a sumptuous production of
Romeo and Juliet starring Booth as Romeo, and Mary McVicker as Juliet. Elaborate productions in
Booth's Theatre followed, but the theatre never became a profitable or even stable financial venture. The
panic of 1873 caused the final
bankruptcy of
Booth's Theatre in 1874. After the bankruptcy, Booth went on another worldwide tour, eventually regaining his fortune.
Booth was married to Mary Devlin from 1860 to 1863, the year of her death. He & Mary Devlin had one daughter, Edwina, born in 1862. He later remarried, wedding his acting partner, Mary McVicker in 1869, and becoming a widower again in 1881.
In 1869, Edwin acquired his brother John's body after repeatedly writing to the president begging for it. The president finally released the remains, and Edwin had them buried, unmarked, in the family plot at
Green Mount Cemetery near
Baltimore.
In 1888 Booth founded
the Players in
New York City, a club for actors and others associated with the arts, and dedicated his home to it. His final performance was, fittingly, in his signature role of Hamlet, in 1891 at the
Brooklyn Academy. He died in 1893 at the Players, and was buried at
Mount Auburn Cemetery next to his first wife, in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Legacy
The Players' Club still exists at his home, at 16 Gramercy Park South.
There is a chamber in
Mammoth Cave in
Kentucky called "Booth's Amphitheatre" - so called because Booth actually entertained visitors there.
Memories of Booth can still be found around
Bel Air, Maryland. In front of the court house is a fountain dedicated to his memory. Inside the post office there's a portrait of him. Also, his childhood home,
Tudor Hall
, still stands and was bought in 2006 by Harford County, Maryland, to become a museum. A statue of him stands in
Gramercy Park in
New York City near his mansion.
Influence on acting
Edwin's acting style was a reaction against that of his father's. While the senior Booth was, like his contemporaries
Edmund Kean and
William Charles Macready, strong and bombastic, favoring characters such as Richard III, Edwin played more
naturalistically, with a quiet, more thoughtful delivery, tailored to roles like
Hamlet.
Modern dramatizations of Booth's life
There have been several modern dramatizations of the life of Edwin Booth, on both stage and screen. One of the most famous was the film
The Prince of Players of 1955, with a sceenplay by
Moss Hart based loosely on the popular book of that name by Eleanor Ruggles, directed by Philip Dunn, starring
Richard Burton and
Raymond Massey as Edwin and Junius Brutus Booth, Senior, and also featuring
Charles Bickford and
Eva Le Gallienne (in a cameo playing Gertrude to Burton's Hamlet); the script depicted events in Booth's life surrounding the assassination of Lincoln by Booth's younger brother.
Austin Pendleton's play,
Booth - which depicted the early years of the brothers Edwin, Junius, and John Wilkes Booth and their father - was produced
Off Broadway at the York Theatre, starring
Frank Langella as
Junius Brutus Booth, Senior, called "a psychodrama about the legendary theatrical family of the 19th century" by the
New York Times; Pendleton had adapted this version from his earlier work,
Booth Is Back, produced at
Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, CT, 1991-1992.
The Brothers BOOTH!, by W. Stuart McDowell, which focused on the relation of the three Booth brothers leading up to the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln, was workshopped with
David Strathairn,
David Dukes, Maryann Plunkett, and Stephan Lang, and presented at Booth's former home,
The Players, and the
Second Stage Theatre in New York, and at
The Guthrie Theatre Lab in Minneapolis, and had its premiere at the Bristol Riverside Theatre outside Philadelphia in 1992. A second play by the same name,
The brothers Booth, which focuses on "the world of the 1860s theatre and its leading family" was written by Marshell Bradley and staged in New York at the Perry Street Theatre in 2004.
Further Information
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