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:
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)
“Allow me, whom Fortune always desires to bury, lay down my life in these final trivialities. Many have freely died in longlasting loves, among whose number may the earth cover me as well.”
—Propertius Sextus (c. 5016 B.C.)