Peg Entwistle - Broadway

Broadway

In 1925 Entwistle was living in Boston as a student of Henry Jewett's Repertory (now called the Huntington Theatre) and was one of the Henry Jewett Players, who were gaining national attention. Walter Hampden gave Entwistle an uncredited walk-on part in his Broadway production of Hamlet which starred Ethel Barrymore. She carried the King's train and brought in the poison-cup.

Entwistle later played the role of "Hedvig" in Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck. After seeing the play Bette Davis told her mother "...I want to be exactly like Peg Entwistle." Some years later Broadway director Blanche Yurka sent a note to Davis asking if she would like to play Hedvig and she sent word back that ever since she had seen Entwistle in The Wild Duck, she knew she would someday play Hedvig. Through the years Davis said Entwistle was her inspiration to take up acting.

By 1926 Entwistle had been recruited by the New York Theatre Guild and her first credited Broadway performance was in June of that year, as "Martha" in The Man from Toronto, which opened at the Selywn Theatre and ran for 28 performances. Entwistle performed in ten Broadway plays as a member of the Theatre Guild between 1926 and 1932, working with noted actors such as George M. Cohan, William Gillette, Bob Cummings, Dorothy Gish, Hugh Sinclair, Henry Travers and Laurette Taylor. Her longest-running play was the 1927 hit Tommy in which she starred with Sidney Toler, which ran for 232 performances and became the play for which she was most remembered.

In April 1927 Entwistle married actor Robert Keith at the chapel of the New York City Clerk's office. She was granted a divorce in May 1929. Along with charges of cruelty, she claimed her husband did not tell her he had been married before and was the father of a six-year-old boy, Brian Keith (who later became an actor).

The play The Uninvited Guest closed after only seven performances in September 1927; however, New York Times critic J. Brooks Atkinson wrote, "...Peg Entwistle gave a performance considerably better than the play warranted."

She went on tour with the Theatre Guild between Broadway productions. Changing characters every week, Entwistle garnered some publicity, such as an article in the Sunday edition of the New York Times in 1927 and another in the Oakland Tribune two years later.

Aside from a part in the suspense drama Sherlock Holmes and the Strange Case of Miss Faulkner and her desire to play more-challenging roles, Entwistle was often cast as a comedienne, most often the attractive, good-hearted ingénue. In 1929 she told a reporter:

"I would rather play roles that carry conviction. Maybe it is because they are the easiest and yet the hardest things for me to do. To play any kind of an emotional scene I must work up to a certain pitch. If I reach this in my first word, the rest of the words and lines take care of themselves. But if I fail, I have to build up the balance of the speeches, and in doing this the whole characterisation falls flat. I feel that I am cheating myself. I don't know whether other actresses get this same reaction or not, but it does worry me."

In early 1932 Entwistle made her last Broadway appearance, in J.M. Barrie's Alice Sit-by-the-Fire, which also starred Laurette Taylor, whose alcoholism led to two missed evening performances and refunds to ticket-holders. The show was cancelled and in the aftermath Entwistle and the other players were given only a week's salary, rather than a percentage of the box office gross which had been agreed upon before the show opened.