Later Life
Booth was married to Mary Devlin from 1860 to 1863, the year of her death. They had one daughter, Edwina, born on December 9, 1861, in London, England. He later remarried, wedding his acting partner, Mary McVicker in 1869, and becoming a widower again in 1881.
In 1869, Edwin acquired his brother John's body after repeatedly writing to President Andrew Johnson begging for it. Johnson finally released the remains, and Edwin had them buried, unmarked, in the family plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.
In 1888 Booth founded the Players' Club, for actors and others associated with the arts, and dedicated his home on Gramercy Park to it. His bedroom in the Club has been kept untouched since his death. His final performance was, fittingly, in his signature role of Hamlet, in 1891 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Booth died in 1893 at the Players', and was buried next to his first wife at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Read more about this topic: Edwin Booth
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“There is in him, hidden deep-down, a great instinctive artist, and hence the makings of an aristocrat. In his muddled way, held back by the manacles of his race and time, and his steps made uncertain by a guiding theory which too often eludes his own comprehension, he yet manages to produce works of unquestionable beauty and authority, and to interpret life in a manner that is poignant and illuminating.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)