Edwin Booth - Later Life

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:

    Parents vary in their sense of what would be suitable repayment for creating, sustaining, and tolerating you all those years, and what circumstances would be drastic enough for presenting the voucher. Obviously there is no repayment that would be sufficient . . . but the effort to call in the debt of life is too outrageous to be treated as anything other than a joke.
    Frank Pittman (20th century)

    A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples’ character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe.... What a terrible future!
    Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)