Shirley booth biography

(b. 30 August 1898 in New York City; d. 16 October 1992 in Chatham, Massachusetts), stage, layer, and television actress known for her character parts, whose work won a number of awards, including Tonys, Emmys, and an Academy Award.

Booth was born Thelma Booth Fording, one of two daughters to Albert James Ford, above all executive with International Business Machines Corporation, and Virginia Discoverer, a home-maker. Shortly after her birth, the family afflicted from Manhattan to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Modern York. Her first public appearance was at age span when she sang “In the Good Old Summertime” include a Sunday school show. In Public School 152 ready money Brooklyn she amused her classmates with her imitations reproduce the teacher. When her composition “Autobiography of a Refulgence Turkey” was chosen for her to read aloud persevere with the student body, the shy child rose to integrity occasion.

When Booth was seven, the family moved to City, Pennsylvania, where they lived at a residential hotel. Substitute resident, J. Hammond Daly, an actor employed by orderly local stock company, befriended the family. Some years ulterior after the family had moved to Hartford, Connecticut, they met again. Daly was still playing in stock suffer Booth asked him if there were any parts be thankful for her. Although Mr. Ford disapproved of acting and rulership daughter’s interest in the stage, he agreed that Daly would introduce his daughter to the company manager. Stall suffered no stage fright, only, as expressed in convoy Life magazine interview with Robert Coughlan, “delight and smashing sense of freedom.”

After a summer of playing stock, she returned home but the following summer rejoined the stack company. Finally, against her father’s wishes she moved deal New York City, seeking a stage career. She was not fourteen, as she claimed, but twenty-three when she got a job as an ingenue, for $35 put in order week, with the Poli stock company and was chosen to a unit playing in New Haven, Connecticut. Quota father forbade her to use his name, so she changed her name from Thelma, which she had not liked, to Shirley, and dropped the Ford. For honesty next ten years she traveled with Poli and burden stock companies, alternating stock with occasional New York runs, most of them brief. Stock was her “bread playing field butter.” She worked in more than 600 different plays, ranging from The Wild Duck to Little Old Advanced York, in a variety of roles. Her favorite allotment was Sadie Thompson in Rain. Booth learned to learn by heart quickly because there was a new play every period, a new musical every fourth week, and four make it to five matinees and six evening performances each week. Stall also became a close observer of people, learning adroit variety of gestures, expressions, and mannerisms to flesh top the characters she was playing.

In 1925 she debuted toil Broadway as the ingenue in Hell’s Bells, playing contradictory another future star, Humphrey Bogart. The play ran courier four months. Other short runs on Broadway followed, as well as Buy, Buy Baby (1926), High Gear (1927), and The War Song (1928).

On 23 November 1929 Booth married Eddie Poggen-burg, who changed his name to Gardner. Gardner recover consciousness a show, starring Booth, of skits based on significance short stories of Dorothy Parker. In 1934 the administrator George Abbott saw Booth in a performance and what because he was casting for Three Men on a Horse (1935), he remembered her as being perfect for righteousness part of Mabel, a gangster’s “moll” with a ineptly “refined” Brooklyn accent. This substantial part served as Booth’s big break and established her as an up-and-coming actress.

The play ran two years and Booth got excellent reviews. She left stock and devoted herself to Broadway. Lead next role was in Excursion (1937). A string in shape long-playing hits followed, including Too Many Heroes (1937) favour The Philadelphia Story (1939). Booth’s portrayal of Liz Imbrie, the photographer in The Philadelphia Story, earned praise put on the back burner the critics and the star, Katharine Hepburn. The succeeding year she played a writer in My Sister Eileen (1940). Reluctant to be typecast as a comedian, Stand turned down a comedy part to try out the serious anti-Nazi drama Tomorrow the World (1943). High-mindedness producer, Theron Bamberger, was concerned that the public would associate her with comedy and laugh. Booth said, importance recalled in a 1953 Time magazine article, “Don’t attention. Getting laughs isn’t quite that easy.” In the marker, costarring Ralph Bellamy, Booth portrayed a teacher combating subjugation. It ran for two years with 499 performances predominant was a notable financial success.

Booth was not only prime on Broadway, she was also on radio, playing goodness part of Miss Duffy on Duffy’s Tavern. The present was created by her husband, who played Archie, say publicly manager. Gardner wrote the part of Miss Duffy, cool sharp-tongued woman with a classic Brooklyn accent, for Kiosk who played it from 1941 to 1943. When she and Gardner divorced in 1942, she finished the ready. Her departure was a serious loss to the portion, and Gardner mounted a nationwide search for her reserve. In a number of guest appearances on other show shows, Booth used her “Miss Duffy” voice, playing varying characters.

Booth married William H. Baker, Jr., formerly an suppose broker, on 24 September 1943. Following World War II, they moved to a dairy farm in Bucks Domain, Pennsylvania, and Booth temporarily retired from the theater. Baker died in 1951. There were no children from either marriage.

Booth’s first musical was Hollywood Pinafore (1945), playing goodness part of a gossip columnist named Louhedda Hopsons (a sly reference to Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons). Skin texture of her songs was “Little Miss Butter-up,” George Kaufman’s version of the Gilbert and Sullivan “Buttercup” classic. Bind 1949 Booth received her first Antoinette Perry (Tony) Stakes for best feminine supporting role in Goodbye, My Fancy. Living on her farm in Pennsylvania, she commuted run to ground Broadway to play the acidtongued congresswoman’s secretary. She day in got more laughs than the star, played by Madeleine Carroll.

However, the role that most people associate with Shirley Booth is that of Lola Delaney, the frumpy wife of an alcoholic husband in William Inge’s domestic misadventure Come Back, Little Sheba (1950). Initially, Booth did jumble want the part. When Lawrence Langner of the Opera house Guild showed her a draft of the play, she read it and liked it, but said it wasn’t for her. She wanted something “lighter.” Langner persisted, snowball persuaded her to try the part. The play unbolt 15 February 1950 on Broadway. From this moment, afterwards 3,500 performances in twenty-two different Broadway plays, Booth was finally a major star. After the final curtain went down opening night, Booth made the traditional visit constitute Sardi’s restaurant to await the reviews. When she walked in the crowd gave her a standing ovation, essential the unsuspecting Booth looked behind her, curious to affection who was being applauded. Her performance, opposite Sidney Blackmer as Doc, resulted in a Tony for best team member actor and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

Following assemblage favorite dictum—“An actress should make you forget everything she has done before”—Booth took a secondary role in churn out next play, the musical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951). Her husband died suddenly while the show was in production, but Booth only missed two rehearsals captivated went back to work in the best tradition contribution the theater: the show must go on. When A Tree Grows in Brooklyn opened, Booth, playing the free-spirited Aunt Sissy, stopped the show with her rowdy installment “Love Is the Reason.” Critic John Mason Brown be grateful for the Saturday Review of Literature (1951) said Booth woke up the show and “her Sissy is among say publicly best things she has done.” She won Billboard’s purse for the best female performance in a musical.

After all the more speculation as to who would play Lola in leadership film version of Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), rectitude assignment was given to Booth. She did not calculate the role, since she had previously been passed abolish for the film versions of Three Men on copperplate Horse, My Sister Eileen, and The Philadelphia Story, skull filmmakers were reportedly suggesting Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, burrow Judy Holliday. Playing Lola on film required some see-saw of Booth, to keep her in tune with illustriousness younger Doc of Burt Lancaster. The film was explosion in one month, and her performance earned a installment of awards, including an Academy Award and the blow actress honors from the National Board of Review, magnanimity New York Film Critics Circle, and the Cannes Worldwide Film Festival.

Booth returned to Broadway, starring as Leona Samish, the lonely spinster in Arthur Laurents’s The Time method the Cuckoo (1952). For the first time her fame stood alone on the marquee of the theatre. Picture title of the play was not there; the exhibition area of the Empire Theatre simply said Shirley Booth. She won another Tony for this role, although she was never happy with the part of a woman who felt sorry for herself. In an interview in Cosmopolitan she remarked, “I had to fight myself to hurl her.” Self-pity was never her style. When Hollywood offered her the role for the film, which became Summertime (1955), Booth turned down the part, and Katharine Actress took it. From 1953 to 1961 Booth played dialect trig number of roles to high critical praise, although say publicly plays themselves were not so well regarded. Although Bookstall never saw herself as a Hollywood star, she frank other films, including About Mrs. Leslie (1954) with Parliamentarian Ryan, Hot Spell (1958), and The Matchmaker (1958), portrayal Dolly Levi. In 1961 she disappointed many of will not hear of peers by “defecting” to television, signing a five vintage contract to play a housemaid, Hazel Burke, on undiluted weekly show of the same name. Hazel was homespun on the Saturday Evening Post cartoon character created unwelcoming Ted Key. The character was outspoken and sassy. Compartment added the elements of warmth and lightheartedness to prestige character. Almost from the start it topped the Nielsen ratings. For this show (1961–1966), she received a back number of awards, including Emmys in 1962 and 1963.

When influence series ended, Booth starred in a television adaptation of The Glass Menagerie (1966), winning another Emmy for present portrayal of Amanda Wingfield. By 1970 she was restore on Broadway in the musical Look to the Lilies and a revival of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever. Neither play was a financial or a critical success. Plod the spring of 1973 Booth shot a half period of episodes for a television comedy A Touch rejoice Grace, playing a perky widow who had moved value with her daughter and son-in-law, but the show was cancelled. She retired after the series folded to put your feet up 1810 home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, living the integrate of her life in relative seclusion. Always a unconfirmed person, Booth once said, “I save my exuberance perform the stage.” Booth died in her home from undiluted stroke.

Although Booth acted in film and on television, near of her professional life was devoted to the depletion. She appeared in more than forty Broadway plays, similar at home in drama and comedy. Critics continually remarked on her versatility. During the 1950s she was declared as the “Queen of the American Theatre,” and envelop 1953 she appeared on the cover of Time quarterly. Booth brought to her roles enormous talent, great manner, warmth, and honesty.

Booth’s scrapbooks and photographs are in description Museum of the City of New York. A protracted article by Katherine Laris is in Notable Women disintegration the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary (1989). Periodical name include John Mason Brown, “Shirley Booth in the Rescue,” Saturday Review of Literature (5 May 1951): 23-24; “Actress,” The New Yorker (19 May 1951); Harry Gilroy, “Hollywood Can’t Change Shirley Booth,” New York Times Magazine (27 Apr. 1952); Robert Coughlan, “New Queen of the Drama,” Life (1 Dec. 1952); Jay Kaye, “Shirley Booth: Broadway’s Choice,” Coronet (Dec. 1953): 48-51; “The Trooper,” Time (10 Aug. 1953); Jon Whitcomb, “Shirley Booth,” Cosmopolitan (Sept. 1958); and Thomas Congdon, “At Home with ‘Hazel’,” Saturday Daytime Post (22 Sept. 1962). Obituaries are in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times (both 21 Supplement. 1992), and London Independent (22 Oct. 1992). A ceremony, “Maid to Order,” is in People Weekly (2 Nov. 1992).

Marcia B. Dinneen