Martha Rofheart

Martha Rofheart (1917 - 1990) was an American writer of historical novels and an actress. She was born Martha Jones May 27, 1917 in Louisville, KY. A model with the Harry Conover agency An actress in the 1940s and 1950s, she made her Broadway debut with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in "The Pirate" in 1942. She appeared in Blythe Spirit, Arsenic and Old Lace, The Heiress, The Respectful Prostitute, and other plays, and toured with Katherine Cornell, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and Maurice Evans. In July 1943, she married actor Robert Emhardt with whom she debuted in The Pirate, then appeared in Harriet on Broadway. After her first marriage ended, she remarried in November 1952 to Ralph Rofheart, an art director and advertising executive, by whom she had one child Evan, in 1957. Soon after her son was born, she choose to be a full time mother, and she stopped pursuing acting. In the late 1960s she began working as a freelance advertising copywriter. In the early 1970s, Rofheart wrote a novel of Henry V of England, Fortune Made His Sword, published in the UK as Cry God For Harry. Critic Granville Hicks, reviewing Fortune Made His Sword in The New York Times Book Review, wrote that Rofheart "deftly avoids the dangers" of writing about a subject that's "Shakespeare territory".

After Fortune Made His Sword, Rofheart wrote five novels, Glendower Country, in the UK published as Cry God for Glendower, My Name Is Sappho, a fictionalised theatrical family saga entitled The Savage Brood.The Alexandrian, and Lionheart!: A Novel of Richard I, King of England.

Several of Rofheart's novels were translated into German, Dutch, Spanish and Serbian.

A short story from later in her life has been published online, "An Evening with Lynn Fontanne".

She died 19 June 1990, in New York City.

Famous quotes containing the word martha:

    You’ve strung your breasts
    with a rattling rope of pearls,
    tied a jangling belt
    around those deadly hips
    and clinking jewelled anklets
    on both your feet.
    So, stupid,
    if you run off to your lover like this,
    banging all these drums,
    then why
    do you shudder with all this fear
    and look up, down;
    in every direction?
    Amaru (c. seventh century A.D.?, Kashmirian king, compiler, author of some of the poems in the anthology which bears his name. translated from the Amaruataka by Martha Ann Selby, vs. 31, Motilal Banarsidass (1983)