Katharine Cornell - Acting Career

Acting Career

Katharine Cornell's most famous role was as English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the 1931 Broadway production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Other appearances on Broadway included: W. Somerset Maugham's The Letter (1927), Sidney Howard's The Alien Corn (1933), Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1934), Maxwell Anderson's The Wingless Victory (1936), S. N. Behrman's No Time for Comedy (1939), a Tony Award-winning Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra (1947), and a revival of Maugham's The Constant Wife (1951).

She appeared in only one film, the World War II morale booster, Stage Door Canteen, in which she played herself and, along with one of the soldiers, recited a speech from Romeo and Juliet. However, she did appear in television adaptations of The Barretts of Wimpole Street (recreating her original role some 20 years later), and Robert E. Sherwood's There Shall Be No Night. She also narrated the Oscar-winning documentary Helen Keller in Her Story.

Primarily regarded as a tragedienne, she was admired for her refined, romantic presence. One reviewer observed, "Hers is not a robust romanticism, however. It tends toward dark but delicate tints, and the emotion she conveys most aptly is that of an aspiring girlishness which has always been subject to theatrical influences of a special sort."

Her friend, modern dance legend Martha Graham, wrote: "One evening Kit spoke of making an exit. 'Martha, when you exit take everything with you, even the grand piano if there is one on the stage.' That is what Katharine Cornell could do, strip a stage leaving the audience a little forlorn and eager for her return."

Her appearances in comedy were infrequent, and praised more widely for their warmth than their wit. When she appeared in The Constant Wife, critic Brooks Atkinson concluded that she had changed a "hard and metallic" comedy into a romantic drama.

Cornell died on June 9, 1974, in Tisbury, Massachusetts (on Martha's Vineyard), aged 81.