It is becoming too apparent that we have seen the last of the charming and delicate art of Annie Russell; the physical power and the emotional intensity of Nance O’Neil’s very real talent find their expression only in plays of a Bernhardtian type that to a great extent has gone out of fashion on the American stage; Rose Stahl, after a long career as America’s best stock actress, leaped into international fame by a single masterpiece of characterization (in The Chorus Lady) which she has not since had an occasion to duplicate; and the charming and well-grounded acting ability of Henrietta Crosman, always condemned to deal with second-rate plays, seems to have run its course, so far as the public is concerned.
To replace these and the other actresses[220] who have dropped from the ranks of active service, or who will, before many years pass, do so, there is, as we have said, no lack of younger women. A stage that can count upon Helen Ware, Margaret Illington, Emma Dunn, Elsie Ferguson, Emily Stevens, Frances Starr, Jane Cowl, Martha Hedman, Doris Keane, Laurette Taylor, Irene Fenwick, and Florence Reed is suffering no weakness on its distaff side. If only our accomplished young actors were as numerous! For each of these women is more than a mere personality—she is a real actress, mistress of the tools of her trade.
Like Miss Anglin, Margaret Illington learned the rudiments of her art in a dramatic school. Coming then from Chicago to New York, she was immediately engaged by Daniel Frohman for a part in The Pride of Jennico. That was fifteen years ago, and it would be beside the point to rank her with those who are, comparatively, untried beginners. Miss Illington is a practiced player with more than a score of excellent impersonations to her credit; of which Mrs. Leffingwell in Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots, Nina Jesson in His House in Order, Marie Voysin in The Thief, Maggie Schultz in Kindling, and Elinor Shale in The Lie are merely the outstanding names. But she is still young and she is one of those who can be counted on to carry on the torch for years to come. “Miss Illington leaves no delicate nuance of expression untouched,” has been written of her. “She has great vitality and physical beauty; she has a perfectly secure and accurate dramatic instinct.... In two of the finest moments [of The Lie] Miss Illington rises to tragic heights. In all of the lighter scenes she is deliciously youthful and piquant.... Fleeting glimpses of humor and enfolding sweetness, and then the big frantic outbursts of righteous anger and superb accusations.” In a part of quite another sort, the harassed wife in Kindling, Miss Illington “acted the ignorant, dumbly struggling, desperate mother truly, simply, touchingly.”
Miss Ferguson is a graduate of the musical comedy chorus, and, for an actress who shows so much ability, her dramatic training has been brief. Only a half dozen rôles had followed her chorus-girls days when she was given a part in Such a Little Queen. She was not a star when the play was produced, but not many days had gone by when her managers boldly, and perhaps prematurely, elevated her to starship. Her beauty and intelligence went far to justify her promotion, and when the pleasantries of Such a Little Queen and The First Lady of the Land were followed by the greater complexities of The Strange Woman and Outcast, it became plain that Miss Ferguson’s emotional truth and sense of impersonation could be those of only a genuine actress. The intellectual note that is strong in her work, and the fluency, versatility and certainty of the technique that she has somehow acquired in her short career, make her the most promising of our younger actresses.
Like Miss Ferguson, Miss Stevens is beautiful, and alive to the finger-tips with the keen intelligence of the modern American woman at her best. Excellent training in her distinguished cousin’s company she has followed by pleasing performances of Emmy in Septimus and Anne in Man and Superman, but of late the plays to which she has been assigned,—like The Child and The Garden of Paradise, have failed so lamentably that the light of her talent is in temporary eclipse.
In Helen Ware, America has an actress who, though her art, as so far revealed, is comparatively limited in scope, is in the very first rank of impersonators of highly-colored “character” parts and of the masterful women of modern melodrama. Her vivid gypsy girl in The Road to Yesterday impressed American theatregoers when she had been on the stage a half-dozen years, and since then her work in The Third Degree, The Woman and Within The Law have more than reënforced that impression. She is an utterly sincere actress, who plans and executes her characterizations with admirable and convincing consistency.
Emma Dunn’s succession of perfectly limned stage portraits of elderly women; Frances Starr’s achievements as Laura Murdock in The Easiest Way and as Dorothy in The Case of Becky; Jane Cowl’s Mary Turner in Within The Law, an impersonation that took Miss Cowl at a single bound almost to the side of Helen Ware; the beautifully feminine and intelligent acting—in an acquired tongue—of Martha Hedman, who has come to us from Sweden; the charmingly restrained and skillful work of Florence Reed in The Yellow Ticket; Doris Keane’s admirably lifelike and subtle impersonation of a prima donna of the sixties in Romance; Irene Fenwick’s vivid Lily Kardos in The Song of Songs, and Laurette Taylor’s exotic princess in The Bird of Paradise, and her delightfully human, humorously pathetic, internationally memorable Peg;—these have hardly had time to become memories. Surely, so far as actresses are concerned, our stage is richly endowed. And not only with native talent. Hedwig Reicher, of German birth and training and an excellent actress of Ibsen’s heroines, and Bertha Kalich, who was born in Austria and acted in New York in Yiddish, have both adopted America and the English tongue and, like Alla Nazimova and Martha Hedman, must henceforth be counted among America’s actresses. Mimi Aguglia is living in our midst, and acts in Italian when, all too rarely, opportunity presents itself.
As for visitors from England, Marie Tempest, Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Gertrude Elliott are almost as familiarly known in this country as at home; the girlish charm of Phyllis Neilson-Terry, and the ample art of Lillah McCarthy, who is equal alike to the exacting demands of Greek tragedy and Shavian satire, it has recently been the privilege of America to witness; Mary Forbes is a newcomer, an actress skilled in both poetic drama and realistic plays; and the too rare visits of the Irish Players have given us the pungent and stimulating art of Sara Allgood.
This chapter, or rather this list,—it could be little more with so many ladies clamoring for their deserved attention,—has at least made one thing clear. On the feminine side of the art of acting, the only art in which women compete with men on more than even terms, the American stage is in a healthy condition. It has been said, often with cynical emphasis, that in America the audiences of women condition the whole art of the drama. But it is not only at the box-office that women outweigh the men in their share in our theatre.