Biography
She was born on 13 December 1879 in Wigan, Lancashire to Madge Carr Cook and Charles Robson, and moved to the United States as a young girl. Her stage career began at age 17 in San Francisco and she worked in stock companies from Honolulu to Milwaukee before making her New York debut in 1900 as Bonita, the ranchman's daughter in Augustus Thomas's Arizona. Her ten-year career as a leading Broadway actress included top roles in such plays as Robert Browning's In a Balcony (1900), Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1903) opposite Kyrle Bellew, Israel Zangwill's Merely Mary Ann (1903–04 and 1907), Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1905), Zangwill's Nurse Marjorie (1906), and Paul Armstrong's adaptation of Bret Harte's Salomy Jane (1907). She retired when she wed August Belmont, Jr. on February 26, 1910.
In 1912 she started The Society for the Prevention of Useless Gift Giving (SPUG) with Anne Tracy Morgan.
Her husband died on 10 December 1924.
Mrs. August Belmont, as she thereafter was known, joined the Metropolitan Opera's Board of Directors in 1933, founded the Metropolitan Opera Guild in 1935 and the National Council of the Metropolitan Opera in 1952. These organisations helped shape the multi-source public-private funding model used by U.S. performing arts organisations in the ensuing decades
Mrs. Belmont died in her sleep in Manhattan on 24 October 1979.
Read more about this topic: Eleanor Robson Belmont
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)