Mary Anderson

of an Ame

Table of

eights of dramatic fame could not be taken by storm; that her past successes, if brilliant, regard being had to her youth and want of training, were far from secure. She was like some fair flower which had sprung up warmed by the genial sunshine, likely enough to wither and die before the first keen blast. Her youth, her beauty, her undoubted dramatic genius, were points strongly in her favor; but these could ill counterbalance, at first at any rate, the want of systematic training, the almost total absence of any experience of the representation by others of the parts w

he disheartened manager was compelled at length to appear before the curtain and announce that, in consequence of the want of public support, the performance could not take place. That day Mary Anderson walked home to her hotel through the quiet streets of the little Kentucky town-which shall be nameless-with a sort of miserable feeling at her heart, that the world had no soul for the great creations of Shakespeare's master-mind, which had so entranced her youthful fancy. It all seemed like a descent into some chill valley of darkness, after the sweet incense of praise, the perfume of flowers, and the crowded theaters which had been her earlier experiences. But the dark storm cloud was soon to pass over, and henceforth almost unbroken sunshine was to attend Mary Anderson's career. For her there was to be no heart-breaking period of mean obscurity, no years of dull unrequited toil. She burst as a star upon the theatrical world, and a star she has remained to this day, because, through all her succ

mmense Western continent. The City of Worcester, a new Pullman car, subsequently used by Sarah Bernhardt, and afterward by Edwin Booth, was chartered for the party, consisting of Mary Anderson, her father, mother, and brother, and the young actress' maid and secretary. A cook and three colored porters constituted the personnel of the establishment. There was a completely equipped kitchen, a dining-room with commodious family table; a tiny drawing-room with its piano, portraits of favorite artists, and some choicely-filled bookshelves, as well as capital sleeping quarters. It was literally a splendid home upon wheels. Where the hotels happened to be inferior at any particular town, the party occupied it through the period of the engagement. Visitors were received, friendly parties arranged, and little of the inconvenience and discomfort of travel experienced. It was thus that Mary Anderson made her first great theatrical tour through

e. He makes his presence known by the midnight serenade beneath her windows; by the bouquets which fall at her feet on every representation, and are sent to the room of her hotel at the same hour each day; by his constant attendance on the departure platform at the railway station. We are n

pertoire, the manager's daughter, with whom she played Juliet and Lady Macbeth alternately, having translated for her "La Fille de Roland," in which she has since appeared with great success. She was then but seventeen and a half, and had never possessed a diamond, when on returning home fr

s blind to the presence of the least fault, and would have turned the head of a young girl not endowed with the sturdy common sense possessed by Mary Anderson; or they are marked by a vindictive animosity which defeats its very object, and practically attracts public notice in favor of an actress it is obviously meant to crush. These newspaper criticisms are further amusing as showing the family likeness which

son played her earliest engagements away from home is, on the whole, the most interesting dramatic criticism of her early performances on record. St. Louis is a city of considerable culture, and stands in much the same relation t

is Globe De

e stage. She played, a short time since, for one week in her native city, Louisville, but this is her first effort upon a stage away from the associations which surround an appearance among friends, and which must, to a great extent, i

an has the following v

s, and she rendered Shakespeare's youngest heroine as she felt her pulsing in his lines.... She leads a return to the source of poetic inspiration, and exemplifies what true artistic instincts and feeling can do on the stage, without either the traditions and experience of acting. She colors her own conceptions and figure of Juliet, and by her work vindicates the master, and proves that Juliet can be p

later on in Mary Anderson's dramatic

te of her immaturity as an artist. We have so often seen aged Juliets; stiff, stagey Juliets; fat, roomy Juliets; and ill-featured Juliets, that the sight of a young, lady-like girl with natural dramatic genius, a bright face, an unworn voice, is truly refreshing. In th

ng internal evidence of a deadly feud existing between Manager Ford and the editor of the Capitol, and the stab is given through the fair bosom of Mary A

Daily Capitol,

oice, while clear, is hard, metallic, at intervals nasal, and all the while stagey. She has been trained in the old Kemble tragic pump-handle style of elocution, that runs talk on stilts. Her manner is crude and awkward. In the balcony scene she only needed a pair of gold rimmed glasses to have made her an excellent schoolmistress, chiding a naughty young man for intruding upon the sacred premises of Madame Fevialli's select academy for young ladies. In the love scenes that followed she was cold enough to be broken to pieces for a refrigerator. But who could have warmed up to such a Romeo? That unpleasant youth pained us with his quite unnecessary gyrations and spasmodic noise. We soon discovered that Miss Anderson had been coached for Juliet without possessing on her part the most distant conception of the character-or capacity to render it, had she the information. She was not doing Juliet from end to end. She was as far from Juliet as the North Pole is from the Equator. She was doing something else. We could not make out clearly what that character was; but it was something quite different and a good way off. Sometimes we thought it was Lady Macbeth, sometim

eer as a ballet dancer, and has grown her laurels from her tears. We suspected Miss Anderson's success. It was too triumphant, too easy. After years of weary labor, of heart-bre

t a campaign with ten defeats, ye

nd unkind in this. She will live, we

n her; but to fetch it out she must go back, begin lower, and give years to training, education, and hard work. She can labor ten years for the sake of living five. As for he

eemed to be saying something anent the great case of Capulet vs. Montague, but so indistinct that there was a general sense of relief when he sta

over him, his plaintive cry of 'Oh, I am ki

one of those marble statues, so peculiar to John T.'s mismanageme

ghed tumultuously to note how it righted itself up in a mysterious m

le house of the Capulets was in reduced circumstances. The building from which Ju

Conestoga. It was all of fifteen feet in height, and depended for ornamentation on a brilliant horse cover thrown over the corner of the balcony, and a slop bucket that Juliet was evidently about to empty on the head of

ordered to extinguish the torch, the poor girl made franti

h carried in his countenance the fixed determination of putting out hi

s given, a puff of wind not only extinguished the torch but shook the scenery, and made us

ulsed with merriment that when poor Juliet was exposed in the tomb she was greeted with laughter, much to the poor girl's embarrassment. And thi

made her Eastern debut at Pittsburg, the Birmingham of America, in the heat of the Presidential election of 1880, and met with a thoroughly enthusiastic reception, to proceed thence to Philadelphia, where she reaped plenty of honor, but very little money. Boston, the Athens of the New World, was reached at length. When Mary Anderson was taken down by the manager to see the vast Boston Theater, whose auditorium sea

o the day of his death. He was seated when she entered, in a richly-carved chair, of which Longfellow told her this charming story. The "spreading chestnut tree," immortalized in "The Village Blacksmith," happened to stand in an outlying village near Boston, somewhat inconveniently for the public traffic at some cross roads. It became necessary to cut it down, and remove the forge beneath. But the village fathers did not venture to proceed to an act which they regarded as something like sacrilege, without consulting Longfellow. At thei

d his judgment of her Juliet deserves to be recorded in letters of gold. The morning after her

find one of Cushman's, but the point having become smooth through use, she told one of the people of the theater to put a small nail at the bottom. Instead of this, he affixed a good-sized spike, and one night Mary Anderson, coming out as usual, drove this right through her foot, in her sudden stop on the cliffs brink. Without flinching, or moving a muscle, w

rk Herald. The engagement proved a great success, and was ultimately extended to six weeks, the actress playing two new parts, Juliet and The Daughter of Roland. She had passed the last ordeal successfully, and might rejoice as she stood on the crest of the hill of Fame that the ambition of her young life was at length realized. Her sub