Lucille Lortel
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Lucille Lortel (December 16, 1900 – April 4, 1999) was an American actress and theater producer who is remembered as the namesake of an off-Broadway playhouse and theatrical award.
Born Lucille Wadler in New York City, Lucille Lortel was originally an actress during the 1920s (she once recollected comparing breast sizes with Helen Hayes). She went on to become an off-Broadway theater producer and impresario with the help of a wealthy husband, industrialist Louis Schweitzer, whom she married in 1931. Her age was a well-kept mystery until nearly the end of her life.
Lortel founded The White Barn Theatre at her estate in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1947.
It is for her that both the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, New York City, and the Lucille Lortel Awards for achievement in off-Broadway productions are named.
She died of natural causes in New York at the age of 98 and is interred at the Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
