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##### June 10, 1974 OBITUARY ## Katharine Cornell Is Dead at 81 ##### By ALDEN WHITMAN Katharine Cornell, one of the great actresses of the American theater, died of pneumonia early yesterday at her home in Vineyard Haven, Mass., on Martha's Vineyard. She was 81 years old. A memorial service is being planned for next week in Vineyard Haven's Association Hall, the 300-year-old former Town Hall that Miss Cornell helped restore. Her body will be cremated in Boston tomorrow. "The First Lady of the Theater" was Alexander Woollcott's phrase for Katharine Cornell. Uttered with that critic's usual hyperbole, the description was nonetheless apt, for Miss Cornell was indisputably a reigning Broadway star of the second quarter of the century, an actress without peer in emotional, romantic roles, and one, moreover, who took her plays to the byways and crossroads of America, thereby helping to shape the country's cultural tastes. With Helen Hayes and Lynn Fontanne, her contemporaries and rivals, Miss Cornell epitomized the artistry of acting. She represented the theater of quality in such dramas as "The Barretts of Wimpole Street," "Romeo and Juliet" and "Candida"--her three greatest triumphs. More than triumphs of winning and holding audiences, of exciting them and dazzling them and illuminating them. One of Miss Cornell's strengths as an artist was her ability to create character. Many of the plays she appeared in were weak or flawed--"The Green Hat," for example--but she could transform the material and create the illusion that the viewer was witnessing a memorable play. Part of this was her acting genius and part her looks. Her face, with its high cheekbones, was somewhat Oriental in cast; her hair was dark brown (almost black) and her prominent eyebrows curved down toward her cheeks. It was a mobile and expressive face, one that captivated, among others, Bernard Shaw. "I don't think I was ever so astonished by a picture as I was by your photograph," the British playwright wrote. "Your success as Candida, and something blonde and expansive about your name, had created an ideal suburban British Candida in my imagination. "Fancy my feelings on seeing in your photograph a gorgeous dark lady from the cradle of the human race--wherever that was--Ceylon, Sumatra, Hilo, or the southernmost corner of the Garden of Eden!" A Director's Comments Miss Cornell's professional and private life was bound up with Guthrie McClintic. When she made her Broadway debut in 1921 in "Nice People," Mr. McClintic, then a young casting director, saw her and wrote in his notebook, "Interesting. Monotonous. Watch." Not only did he observe her but also by early fall he had married her. The union was a championship that lasted for 40 years until Mr. McClintic's death in 1961. In that time he directed her plays and helped to mold her abundant talents. At his death she left the stage, for she felt that acting without him would be too difficult. "If not for Guthrie, I think I would have continued just drifting," Miss Cornell remarked many years later. "He wanted to be an actor and my career was a sublimation of his desire, because he could pour his talents through me and that was a great advantage to me. "I continued in the theater buoyed up mostly by his enthusiasm for it. He was one of those people who fascinated you always. You were never bored; sometimes upset, but never bored." As well as heartening critical successes, the actress had a number of discomforting failures-- among them Jean Anouilh's "Antigone," Christopher Fry's "The First Born" and S. N. Behrman's "No Time for Comedy." Her feel for comedy was limited, and she had an unhappy tendency to throw away laughs, in the critic John Mason Brown's phrase, "as profligately as Madame Ranevsky threw away money." Lusty or romantic women were more to Miss Cornell's aptitude. Her first starring role was Iris March, the lost but sexually hearty heroine of Michael Arlen's "The Green Hat," which was produced in 1925. For several years she was the femme fatale in such melodramas as "The Letter" and "Dishonored Lady." Formed Producing Unit In the thirties, however, she all but dropped that role for straight romance, a step that coincided with the establishment of her producing association, called Katharine Cornell Presents. Its first play, in 1931, was Rudolf Besier's "The Barretts of Wimpole Street," the courtship and elopement of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Revived five times, it fixed Miss Cornell in theatergoers' minds as a romantic actress. Describing the play and Miss Cornell's impact at the time, Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times drama critic, wrote on opening night: "[The play] introduces us to Katharine Cornell as an actress of the first order. Here the disciplined fury she has been squandering on catch-penny plays becomes the vibrant beauty of finely wrought character. "By the crescendo of her playing, by the wild sensitivity that lurks behind her ardent gestures and her piercing stares across the footlights she charges the drama with a meaning beyond the facts it records. Her acting is quite as remarkable for the carefulness of its design as for the fire of her presence." "The Barretts" ran for a year on Broadway, and then Miss Cornell shepherded her company on a 20,853-mile tour of the United States, a daring venture in the Depression. They performed repertory in 77 cities and towns--places like Thomasville, Ga.; Amarillo, Tex., and Portland, Me. The plays, in addition to "The Barretts," were "Candida" and "Romeo and Juliet." "We opened up the road," Miss Cornell said. "We made 'The Barretts' and 'Candida' pay for Shakespeare. 'The Barretts' never played to an empty house--the receipts would be something like $33,000, then about $28,000 for 'Candida' and for 'Juliet' about $18,000 to $19,000, so that we came back having more than broken even. We really felt prideful. "We continued like that for many years, alternatively New York with the road, paying for ourselves with Sidney Howard's 'Alien Corn,' Shaw's 'St. Joan' and 'The Doctor's Dilemma' and some of the others--until later on, when costs got too high with 'Anthony and Cleopatra,' we had to call in angels." The Audience Waited Miss Cornell's hold on her audiences was astonishing. One Christmas Day the troupe was on its way from Montana to Seattle for a week's engagement opening that evening. Floods delayed the train, and at curtain time the actors were far from Seattle and resigned to missing the performance--and their pay for it. The train finally arrived at 11:15, and the group discovered that the audience was still waiting. The curtain rose at 1:05, and Mr. Woollcott, who was present, described the experience: "The excitement, the heady compliment paid by the audience in having waited at all, acted like wine on the spirits of the troupe and they gave the kind of performance one hopes for on great occasions and never gets." The actress's skill on the stage was all the more remarkable because she was usually nervous and fidgety before she went on. "I was nervous from the very beginning and it got worse as the years went on," she once confessed, adding: "I was conscientious and wanted to do more, always, than I was able. I don't think, when I was playing, that I was ever happy--beginning at 4 o'clock any afternoon." Born in Berlin Katharine Cornell's bent for acting was familial, since both her grandfather and her father were both actors manque. She was the only child of Dr. Peter C. and Alice Cornell, and she was born in Berlin, where her father was studying surgery. The precise date was a mystery. For years she said it was Feb. 16, 1898; but when she was in her 70's she offered the year as 1893, explaining: "When an actress is younger she likes to lower her age, but when she is older she likes to add to her years." In any event, Katharine had an early exposure to the theater in Buffalo, where the family lived for many years and where her father quit medicine to manage a playhouse. "I drifted into acting," she once remarked. "My grandfather had a house in Buffalo in which there was a stage and his friends met every two weeks or so to put on plays. "So it was natural for met to put on plays too when I went to boarding school. I put on everything in the drama--I was indiscriminate. I put on Yeats and Shaw and Lady Gregory." Her first professional opportunity came when the director of the Washington Square Players visited her school in Mamaroneck, N.Y., to do a play. Recalling the occasion, Miss Cornell said: "[Eddie Goodman] told me to come and see him if I ever wanted a job. When I did, he gave me a part in 'Bushido,' a No drama they were putting on. All I got to say was 'My son, my son'; it was a very exciting moment when they told me I could have the part. That was in 1917. "I sort of slid from one thing to another after that. I was with the Jessie Bonstelle Stock Company in Detroit and Buffalo for three seasons--10 performances and a new play every week. She was an amazing woman who did a great deal for me." One of the things Miss Bonstelle did for Miss Cornell was to take her to London as Jo in "Little Women." She was seen there by, among others, two Scottish women who urged her upon Allen Pollock, a producer, who was searching for an actress for Clemence Dane's "A Bill of Divorcement," to be presented in New York. She got the part of an ingenue, and she had a personal triumph when the play opened in 1921. It ran for two seasons. After appearing in some indifferent dramas, she did the title role in "Candida" in 1924 to critical raves. One of them read: "The tenderness, the poetry, the supreme womanliness of Katharine Cornell's impersonation of the title part puts this actress a notch ahead of anything she has yet attempted. It is an impersonation touched by the wand of genius." Then there was "The Green Hat" and assured stardom status that pulled through such dubious dramas as "Dishonored Lady" and "The Age of Innocence" in the late twenties. Whatever the role, Miss Cornell declined to have retrospective regrets. "The audience may not have felt it was right and the author may have felt a little upset, but every part I've played I've twisted around in my mind until I've made it into something of my own," she said. "Looking back over it, I didn't deliberately sit down and plan like that, but it does read like it." Most of her plays were chosen by her husband, "who gave me the confidence needed." "Guthrie persuaded me to do Shakespeare and I was very frightened of Shakespeare, she remarked, adding: "There are some plays we never got around to doing. Shaw's 'Heartbreak House,' for example, but I simply could not find my way through to Mrs. Hushye. I couldn't connect with her. We kept around any number of versions of 'The Cherry Orchard' and never did anything about that either." She did one Chekhov play, however, "The Three Sisters," in which she brought together Judith Anderson, Ruth Gordon, Alexander Knox and Edmund Gwenn. It ran for 230 performances in the season of 1942-43. Indeed, Miss Cornell was generous in selecting her supporting casts, which over the years included Marlon Brando, Brian Aherne, Charles Boyer, Grace George, Tyrone Power, Gregory Peck, Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier. Diminished Dazzle In the fifties, toward the end of her career, Miss Cornell seemed to many observers to have a diminished dazzle. "The Dark Is Light Enough," "The First Born" and "Dear Liar" did not draw the oohs and aahs of her previous plays. The actress was reluctant to appear on radio or television. She did act for them, but they were not her media. For years Miss Cornell and her husband lived in a house on Beekman Place. Then in 1951 they moved to Sneden's Landing, N.Y., and after Mr. McClintic's death she gave up that house for a summer place on Martha's Vineyard and a small house in New York. For her acting and her contributions to the stage, the actress received dozens of awards and honorary degrees. A room at the New York Public Library's theater collection at Lincoln Center was dedicated to her and her husband. And she was given the National Artists Award of the American National Theater and Academy, a gold medal, on which ironically, her first name was spelled "Katherine." The citation was less in error, for it lauded her "incomparable acting ability and her theatrical genius" and said that she had "elevated the theater throughout the world."
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