Katharine Cornell (February 16, 1893 – June 9, 1974) was a German-born American stage actress, writer, theater owner and producer. She was born in Berlin to American parents and raised in Buffalo, New York.
Dubbed "The First Lady of the Theatre" by critic Alexander Woollcott, Cornell was the first performer to receive the Drama League Award, for Romeo and Juliet in 1935. Cornell is noted for her major Broadway roles in serious dramas, often directed by her husband, Guthrie McClintic. The couple formed C. & M.C. Productions, Inc., a company that gave them complete artistic freedom in choosing and producing plays. Their production company gave first or prominent Broadway roles to some of the more notable actors of the 20th century, including many British Shakespearean actors.
Cornell is regarded as one of the great actresses of the American theatre. Her most famous role was that of English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the 1931 Broadway production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Other appearances on Broadway included in W. Somerset Maugham's The Letter (1927), Sidney Howard's The Alien Corn (1933), Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1934), Maxwell Anderson's The Wingless Victory (1936), S. N. Behrman's No Time for Comedy (1939), a Tony Award-winning Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra (1947), and a revival of Maugham's The Constant Wife (1951).
Cornell was noted for spurning screen roles, unlike other actresses of her day. She appeared in only one Hollywood film, the World War II morale booster Stage Door Canteen, in which she played herself. She appeared in television adaptations of The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Robert E. Sherwood's There Shall Be No Night. She also narrated the documentary Helen Keller in Her Story, which won an Oscar.
Primarily regarded as a tragedienne, Cornell was admired for her refined, romantic presence. One reviewer wrote "Hers is not a robust romanticism, however. It tends toward dark but delicate tints, and the emotion she conveys most aptly is that of an aspiring girlishness which has always been subject to theatrical influences of a special sort." Her appearances in comedy were infrequent, and praised more widely for their warmth than their wit. When she played in The Constant Wife, critic Brooks Atkinson concluded that she had changed a "hard and metallic" comedy into a romantic drama.
Cornell died in Tisbury, Massachusetts at the age of 81, and her ashes are interred at Martha's Vineyard's Tisbury Village Cemetery.
Cornell was born February 16, 1893, into a prominent, wealthy family distantly related to Ezra Cornell, founder of Cornell University. Her great-grandfather Samuel Garretson Cornell, a descendant of pioneer ancestor Thomas Cornell, came to Buffalo in the 1850s, and founded Cornell Lead Works. One of his grandsons, Peter, married Alice Gardner Plimpton. The young couple lived in Berlin when Peter was studying medicine at the University of Berlin. Their first child, Katharine, was born there. Six months later, the family returned to Buffalo, where they lived at 174 Mariner Street. As a child, Katharine had a troubled relationship with her parents due in part to her mother's alcoholism. She play-acted in her backyard with imaginary friends. Soon, she was performing in school pageants and plays, and she watched family productions in her grandfather's attic theater, still standing at 484 Delaware Avenue. Cornell played at the Buffalo Studio Club parlor theater, located at 508 Franklin Street. She loved athletics, and she was a runner-up for city championship at tennis as well as an amateur swimming champion. She attended the University of Buffalo (later the State University of New York at Buffalo).. In 1913, she joined The Garret Club, a woman's only private club in Buffalo, and participated in club theatricals.
After Cornell had become famous, she often brought her productions to her native Buffalo. Although she never returned to Buffalo to live, her enthusiasm for the city and its inhabitants was well known. Biographer Tad Mosel wrote: "To show her affection for her hometown, she always walked slowly when she left her hotel, turning her head to smile on everyone on the street, missing no one, so they could feel close to her and be able to say when they got home that night, 'Katharine Cornell smiled directly at me.'" For the rest of her career, on opening Broadway nights, she was greeted backstage by family and friends from Buffalo. Many of her productions were performed at the Erlanger Theater on Delaware Avenue, across from the Statler Hotel. The Erlanger was demolished in 2007.
In 1915, Cornell's mother died, leaving her enough money to be independent. The young woman moved to New York City to pursue her acting career. There she joined the Washington Square Players and was hailed as one of the most promising actresses of the season. After just two seasons, she joined Jessie Bonstelle's company, a leading New York repertory company that divided its summers between Detroit and Buffalo. Now aged 25, Cornell was consistently receiving glowing reviews.
Cornell joined various theater companies, including the Bonstelle, that toured around the East Coast. In 1919, she went with the Bonstelle company to London to play Jo March in Buffalo play-wright Marian de Forest's stage adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women. Although the critics disparaged the play itself, they specifically noted Cornell as the one bright spot of the evening. The paper The Englishwomen wrote of Cornell: "London is unanimous in its praise, and London will flock to see her." Upon her return to New York, she met Guthrie McClintic, a young theater director. She made her Broadway debut in the play Nice People by Rachel Crothers, in a small part with Tallulah Bankhead.
Cornell's first major Broadway role was that of Sydney Fairfield in Clemence Dane's A Bill of Divorcement (1921). The New York Times wrote "[she] has the central and significant role of the play and...gives therein a performance of memorable understanding and beauty." It played for 173 performances, well enough to be considered a hit. Afterward, Cornell played in a succession of now-forgotten plays.
She married McClintic on September 8, 1921, in her aunt's summer home in Cobourg, Ontario. Cornell's family spent summers there among other wealthy Americans. The couple eventually bought a townhouse at 23 Beekman Place in Manhattan. It is generally acknowledged that Cornell was a lesbian and that McClintic was gay, and their union was a lavender marriage. She was a member of the "sewing circles" in New York, and had relationships with Nancy Hamilton, Tallulah Bankhead, Mercedes de Acosta, and others.
In 1924, Cornell and McClintic were part of The Actor's Theatre, a successor to the Washington Square Players. This was a group of actors that sought to be a democracy without any stars. As their first production, they selected Candida by George Bernard Shaw. At the time, the play was considered perfect for the group, as none of the characters was considered to outshine the others, because Shaw intended the play to be about ideas. Although the leading protagonist is Candida, she does not really come into her own until the third act. But, Cornell essentially re-envisioned the play. She made Candida the core of the play, a view adopted by directors and critics ever since. Reviews were ecstatic and audiences responded in kind. The Actor's Theatre changed its plans and decided that Cornell's name must appear above the play's title in all future productions of the troupe. Another acting troupe, the Theatre Guild, controlled the rights to all Shaw's plays, and thereafter allowed only Cornell to play the role of Candida so long as she was alive, a role which she reprised several more times in her career. Shaw later wrote her a note stating that she had created "an ideal British Candida in my imagination."
Cornell's next role was to play Iris March in The Green Hat (1925), a romance by Michael Arlen. The play had themes of syphilis and loose morals, and Iris March was a strong sexual creature. Leslie Howard played the role of Napier. While the play was still in Chicago, it became an international hit, known all over the US and Europe. Ashton Stevens, senior drama critic in Chicago, wrote that The Green Hat "should die at every performance of its melodramatics, its rouge and rhinestones, its preposterous third act.... Already, I am beginning to forget its imperfections and remember only its charms." Its chief charm, he conceded, was Cornell, who sent "tiny bells up and down my unpurchasable vertebrae." Most other critics panned the play itself, but nonetheless found it irresistible because of Cornell's ability to mesmerise, despite the garish dialogue. Critic George Jean Nathan wrote that the play was "superbly acted in its leading role by that one young woman who stands head and shoulders above all the other young women of the American theater, Miss Katharine Cornell."