Edwin Forrest
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Edwin Forrest (March 9, 1806 - December 12, 1872), American actor, was born at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania of Scottish and German descent.
This unusual actor made his first stage appearance on November 27, 1820, at the Walnut Street theatre, in Homes Douglas. He soon gained fame for portraying blackface caricatures of African Americans. Constance Rourke wrote that his impression was so believable he often mingled in the streets with African Americans unnoticed. He allegedly fooled one old black woman into taking him for a friend and then convinced her to join him in his stage performance that night.
In 1826 he had a great success in New York as Othello, and in 1829 he was featured as Metamora in the play Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags by John Augustus Stone.
His life was not without controversy and some notoriety. He played at Drury Lane in the Gladiator in 1836, but his Macbeth in 1843 was hissed by the English audience, and his affront to rival actor William Charles Macready in Edinburgh shortly afterwards when he stood up in a private box and hissed Macready was fatal to his popularity in Britain. His jealousy of Macready resulted in the Astor Place riot in 1849. In 1837 Forrest had married Catherine, daughter of John Sinclair, an English singer, and his divorce suit in 1852 was a cause célébre which, it is said, hurt his reputation and soured his temper. His last appearance was as Richelieu in Boston in 1871.
In his later years, Forrest lobbied for the rights of smaller theatres against the increasingly powerful conglomerated theatre companies, earning him the nickname "Little Man Edwin." His love of the theatre was unbounded, and he is one of the few whose memory survives to this day, for he used his considerable accumulated wealth to support his fellow actors, perhaps in appreciation of the fact that supporting actors need themselves to be supported as they get older.
This began in 1865, the year of Lincoln's assassination by the actor John Wilkes Booth, a time when the public held them in low regard, if not contempt. He sheltered actors at his summer home near Philadelphia, and in 1876, four years after his death at the age of 66, his will instructed that there should be formed the Forrest Home for retired actors in Philadelphia, which was to last for over one hundred years before being folded into the much larger Actors Fund facility in Englewood, New Jersey. There his name lives on, in the Edwin Forrest Wing.
See Lawrence Barrett's Edwin Forrest (Boston, 1881).
[edit] Notes
- ↑ Rourke, Constance (1931). American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Quoted in Watkins 83.
[edit] References
- Watkins, Mel (1994). On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. New York: Simon & Schuster.
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
