Beginning of Acting Career
Forrest made his first stage appearance on November 27, 1820, at the Walnut Street Theatre, in Douglas by John Home. The theatres of New York and Philadelphia were already crowded with trained and successful actors. Forrest therefore set out at once for the south and west. His tour through a rough country — with the inconveniences of long distances, the necessity of presenting his plays in rude halls, insufficient support, and poor scenery — was not altogether successful, but the discipline to mind and body was felt in all his subsequent career. He soon gained fame for portraying blackface caricatures of African Americans. Constance Rourke wrote that his impression was so believable he often mingled in the streets with African Americans unnoticed. He allegedly fooled one old black woman into taking him for a friend and then convinced her to join him in his stage performance that night.
Read more about this topic: Edwin Forrest
Famous quotes containing the words beginning of, beginning, acting and/or career:
“The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“Surely, ‘tis one step towards acting well, to think worthily of our nature; and as in common life, the way to make a man honest, is, to suppose him so ... so here, to set some value upon ourselves, enables us to support the character ... of generosity and virtue.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)