By Robert A Schanke
The first full-length biography of degree actress Eva Le Gallienne lines her lifestyles from her start into the bothered yet attention-grabbing family of Richard Le Gallienne, British author and intimate member of the Oscar Wilde circle, to her fresh death.
This accomplished biography of the actress Rex Reed known as "a nationwide treasure" attracts upon Robert A. Schanke’s interviews and correspondence not just with Le Gallienne but additionally with a couple of hundred of her colleagues and neighbors, together with Glenda Jackson, Burgess Meredith, Eli Wallach, Peter Falk, Ellen Burstyn, Anne Jackson, Farley Granger, Jane Alexander, Uta Hagen, and Rosemary Harris. Forty-two illustrations supply highlights of Le Gallienne’s many awesome performances in such performs as Hedda Gabler, Liliom, The Cherry Orchard, Peter Pan, Camille, Mary Stuart, The Royal kin, and The Dream Watcher.
Behind her public position as well-known actress and because the founding and protecting strength of the 1st civic repertory theatre within the usa, Eva Le Gallienne led a personal existence afflicted by means of her own fight with lesbianism. For greater than fifty years she lived in shadows. Like many lesbians of her iteration, she considered herself as a guy trapped in a feminine physique. simply because she used to be unwilling to compromise and conceal her precise self in a handy marriage or to camouflage her relationships on the way to develop her occupation, her sexuality turned a nemesis that outlined her nice desire for privacy.
Le Gallienne complained that her lesbianism ruined her occupation. And as Robert Schanke issues out, it additionally encouraged her collection of scripts, administration practices, and magnificence of performing, finally affecting her work’s serious reception. by means of featuring for the 1st time this whole account of the lifetime of one of many theatre’s nice abilities, Schanke presents his viewers with a desirable tale that still serves as a barometer of the altering values, tastes, and attitudes of yank society.
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Additional info for Shattered Applause: The Lives of Eva Le Gallienne
Sample text
In 1907, when he was most desperate for money, he sold dle last of his library, including a treasured letter from Robert Louis Stevenson. He suffered not only from his customary asthma and alcoholism but from bouts of cold and hunger and was on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown. At one point, he wrote to Julie dlat he was embarrassed that his sister and husband were paying all of Hesper's expenses. "3 Even though Julie had limited funds, in late autumn of 1905 they moved to a larger apartment at 5 Rue de Regard.
In February Richard published his novel The Worshipper of the Image. The story concerns a poet who lives in a lovely country house with his wife and children. He acquires a plaster mold of a suicide victim that bears an uncanny resemblance to his wife. The poet falls in love with the image and proceeds to neglect his wife, who eventually commits suicide. A rather morbid fantasy, the book detailed the author's continued mourning for his first wife. Julie was livid with the publication. A few weeks latel; Richard left Chiddingfold.
4 By the time the two men had met, WiJde was already a skilled connoisseur of likely-looking young men. His charm and mastery of language, as well as his rich, syrupy voice with its Irish intonations, could almost always bring a smile. As one of his biographers put it, he had become "consumed with his passion for moving swiftly from one to another of the boys he met .... Wilde was hypnotized not by any individual but by his conception of pleasure, of supermanship.... "5 Although most of Wilde's friends in London were homosexual, there is no clear evidence of a physical relationship between him and Richard.