Genevieve Hamper, the Most Beautiful Face on Earth

Loretta reports:

My husband, who recently debuted his own nerdy history blog, has acquired some fascinating material in the way of postcards. Thanks to him, I discovered Genevieve Hamper (1888-1971) and Robert Mantell (1854-1928).

A search brought me to advertisements and reviews of their first motion picture a “surpassing Photo-Play debut of Robert B Mantell America’s foremost Tragedian and Genevieve Hamper Most Beautiful Face on Earth in a stirring arraignment of Society’s Sins The Blindness of Devotion.”

The quote is from a publicity ad in New York Evening Telegram November 1915. It’s here in Rex Ingram, Hollywood’s Rebel of the Silver Screen. There’s more concise coverage on the Turner Classic Movie page for the film.

However, as the ad indicates Ms. Hamper and her husband Mr. Mantell were already highly regarded stage actors. Though, apparently, they never made it big on Broadway, they traveled all over North America, putting on a series of plays—not one play, for a week, but, as the post card shows, eight performances of different “Shakespearean and Classic plays.” Obviously, these were greatly abridged.

My impression was, this was rather like the traveling theater troupes Dickens portrayed in Nicholas Nickleby, but quite a bit smaller. From all I’ve been able to discover, there were three players at most in the performances. Not that this means they didn’t put on a good show. As I described in a blog post some years ago, I saw a splendid one-man performance of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I suspect the audience at the Worcester Theatre got their money’s worth, too.

To give you an idea of how famous they were, the Theatre Magazine of 1921 devoted two pages to photos of their place in N.J., where they spent summers rehearsing

Though they continued to make films after The Blindness of Devotion, it seems that these, like so many of the era, did not survive.

Thanks to Larry Abramoff, our dear friend, who donated his amazing collection of post cards to my husband’s project.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it. 

Shakespeare's Buildings, Lost, Found, Recreated

William Shakespeare-Chandos Portrait

Loretta reports:

Shakespeare’s birthday is 26 April, but since this is my day to post, we celebrate a day early.

I hastily put down a date, which turned out to be wrong, so let's just celebrate Shakespeare's being born in April around this time, we think.

I had a chance to experience a Shakespeare play in something close to what it might have been like when he was alive. A few years ago, we were in England, and had, for once, made reservations sufficiently far in advance to see one of the Bard’s works at the recreated Globe Theatre.

Though it represents an educated guess at what the original Globe was like, it seemed an authentic enough experience to me. At one point in the performance of Much Ado About Nothing, it started raining. Those standing under the open roof pulled up their rain hoods or umbrellas or simply got rained on.

It was an altogether different experience from watching a performance in a closed theater, or even at an outdoor theater. For one thing, the playhouse is small, and the audience is practically mingling with the players. All in all, it was a fabulous experience, and I hope to return next year.

The Globe

That was one reason I became so intrigued when an email message invited me to look at this beautiful series of Shakespeare-related photographs—including some fine shots of the recreated Globe Theatre—and I learned about the discovery, by members of the Museum of London Archaeology,  of the Curtain Theatre, where it’s believed some of Shakespeare’s plays made their debuts.

The Curtain is going to be a centerpiece, interestingly enough, of a luxury development. You can find out more here and here.

There’s more about the Curtain Theatre at the MOLA site, and you can learn more about MOLA on their blog.

Images: Shakespeare, Chandos portrait, National Portrait Gallery via Wikipedia.
The Globe Theatre courtesy Shakespeare's Buildings

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Intrepid Women: Actress Sarah Siddons, 1755-1831

Isabella reporting,

In my new book, A RECKLESS DESIRE, my humbly born heroine Lucia di Rossi is determined to become an actress, and the hero Rivers is equally determined to guide her to dramatic success. For her debut in London, Lucia appears as Ophelia in a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a role that Rivers chooses as fitting her gift for tragedy.

The inspiration for much of Lucia's budding career comes from the most famous dramatic actress of the Georgian era, the legendary Sarah Kemble Siddons (1755-1831.) Although she was born into a theatrical family, Sarah's parents wished better for her than to be an actress, and also wished to remove her from the handsome but empty-headed leading man in the family troupe. They sent sixteen-year-old Sarah to Warwickshire, far from her sweetheart, where they hoped she would learn to become a lady's maid in a country house.

But Sarah forgot neither William Siddons nor acting, and entertained her fellow servants with dramatic readings in the servants' hall and before her master's guests. Finally her parents relented, and at eighteen, she married Siddons, and with him joined a provincial acting company. Word of her success there reached the famous London actor and producer David Garrick, who gave her her first role at Drury Lane in 1775.

It was a disaster. The critics were not kind, and she herself said that "she was banished from Drury Lane as a worthless candidate for fame and fortune."

But the twenty-year-old Sarah refused to be discouraged. She returned to playing lesser theaters to hone her craft and mature into the tragic roles that would become her specialty, and to bear the first of her seven children. When she returned to Drury Lane in 1782, her performance was a triumph, and she never looked back.

While most successful Georgian actresses were graced with conventional beauty (some things never change), Sarah's appearance was more striking than pretty. She was tall, with flashing dark eyes, a prominent profile, and an intensity that mesmerized audiences. She specialized in playing powerful roles of tragic women, and made Lady Macbeth her own. She fascinated artists as well as playgoers, and she sat for all the major portrait painters of the day - Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Gilbert Stuart, John Downman, George Romney, and Thomas Lawrence - who all attempted to capture her brilliance.

Sarah was remarkably dedicated to her career. Part of this was from necessity - she was the main support of her large family - and part was her own drive to perform. She continued to appear on stage throughout all of her pregnancies, usually up until a few weeks before giving birth. As her children grew, they were incorporated into her performances when her role called for her to play mothers. The audiences loved her all the more for it.

Sarah formally retired from the theatre in 1812 after a career that stretched forty years. As writer and critic William Hazlitt noted, "passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine. She was tragedy personified."

Upper left: Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1784, Huntington Art Gallery.
Right: Sarah Siddons by John Downman, 1787, National Portrait Gallery.
Lower left: Mrs. Sarah Siddons by George Romney, c1785, private collection.