A little over a year after this unexpected close to her brilliant public career Mary Anderson became Mrs. Antonio F. de Navarro. Her husband was a native of New York, of Spanish extraction, and like herself, of Catholic faith. They were married on June 17, 1890, at the Catholic church at Hampstead, London. During the last half dozen years of her stage career Mary Anderson had become almost an Englishwoman by adoption. Her new home was made in the little village of Broadway, Worcestershire, and there she has always since lived, enjoying the peaceful life and the domestic happiness for which she longed and which she so richly deserved. She has two children, a son and a daughter. There have not been lacking attempts to tempt her again behind the footlights. Enormous sums have been offered without the least effect. For charity she has read or sung once or twice in modest programs, but that is all. The people of Broadway fairly worship her for the gracious and kindly lady she is. Since her marriage she has made a few visits to America, and the American public of the theatre was recently reminded of the former light of its stage when she assisted Robert Hichens in the dramatization of The Garden of Allah. But Mary Anderson, though she is now well under sixty, for a quarter of a century has been to most of us only an illustrious name of the past, and to our elders a tenderly treasured memory.
The estimate of Mary Anderson with which she has usually been dismissed by the casually critical is that she was not a great actress, but an unusually handsome, charming and talented woman who is memorable chiefly as a demonstration that the stage can be the working place of a wholesome, womanly woman.
As to whether she was a great actress there was and is a wide difference of opinion. To her more partial admirers she was the “authentic queen of the American stage,” who in each of her parts “gave an individual and potential impersonation.”[161] “Such moments in her acting,” wrote William Winter, who has always been her friend and admirer, “as that of Galatea’s mute supplication at the last of earthly life, that of Juliet’s desolation after the final midnight parting with the last human creature whom she may ever behold, and that of Hermione’s despair when she covers her face and falls as if stricken dead, are the eloquent, the absolute, the final denotements of genius.”
A great deal of contemporary criticism was decidedly less enthusiastic than this. While thoroughly believing in Miss Anderson’s devotion to her profession and her conviction of its dignity, many good judges saw in her a woman of talent only, not a genius. The art of the theatre was to her a matter of the highest ideals, deserving the service of the best and noblest in the natures of its followers. Yet as an actress practicing this art she seemed to many incapable of placing her work on any but a personal basis. Insight into character, it was said, was impossible to her—her Galatea, Parthenia, Pauline, Rosalind and the rest were but herself in different guises. A striking instance of her lack of dramatic insight was her inability to adapt herself to W. S. Gilbert’s conception of his own Galatea. He wished her to suggest the comic or satiric value of some of her speeches, but she was unable to bring about the necessary subordination of her own personality. The heroic and obviously tragic were her forte. A thoroughly good woman herself, she was rigidly confined by the limits of her temperament, as well as by her views of what the stage should show, to the delineation of good women. She was probably quite incapable of expressing a purely animal nature. “Her acting is polished, and in correct taste,” said the Morning Post of London, “what it wants is freshness, spontaneity, abandon. Of the feu sacre which irradiated Rachel and gives to Bernhardt splendor ineffable, Miss Anderson has not a spark. She is not inspired. Hers is a pure, bright, steady light; but it lacks any mystic effulgence. She is beautiful, winsome, gifted, and accomplished. To say this is to say much, and it fills to the brim the measure of legitimate praise. She is an eminently good, but not a great artist.”
The word “beautiful” is sure to turn up in any criticism of Mary Anderson. Never was the word used with more justification. She was “a classic figure gotten by mistake into an unclassic epoch.” She was of innate dignity, tall and statuesque, “of imperial figure,” fair haired, blue-eyed. Her features were finely chiseled and regular and at once suggested the Greek ideal. Her voice, rich, tender, and with wonderfully full bodied and expressive lower tones, was one of her chief charms. Many men today have those tones still echoing in their minds.
But the spell of her beauty was that it seemed more than skin-deep. It was the expression of a noble temperament, the beauty of a woman of high feeling and sensitiveness, and yet of dignity. It was an essential part of her appeal, though this was not an appeal to the eye alone. It was the beauty of the actress, who could be sincerely concerned first of all with the ideals of her art, of the woman who could say: “The highest praise I receive is the knowledge that someone has gone from the audience with an increased light as to the development of character, a higher sense of moral responsibility, a better spiritual condition for having seen the play.”
Whether or not this beautiful woman was a great actress, she was “our Mary” to countless thousands, and such a title is not earned by commonplaceness and dignity, however beautiful. About Mary Anderson there hangs somehow a sense of enchantment, of the realization of an ideal of loveliness, joy and purity. And whether or not she was a genius, there is something heroic in the amplitude of her career. She began as a poor girl, living in an obscure place, without connection with the theatre. By her noble aspirations, her zeal and patience in their pursuit, and her modesty and worth in their fulfillment, she succeeded gloriously.
In the autumn of 1915, in a performance for the benefit of one of the British war-charities, Mary Anderson acted the sleep-walking scene from Macbeth and the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.