Nathaniel Carl Goodwin
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Nathaniel Carl Goodwin (July 25, 1857 – January 31, 1919) was an American actor and vaudevillian born in Boston. While clerk in a large shop he studied for the stage and made his first appearance in 1874 at the Howard Athenaeum in Boston in Stuart Robson's company as the newsboy in Joseph Bradford's Law in New York. The next year he appeared at Tony Pastor's Opera House in New York City where he began his career as a vaudevillian.
In 1876, he appeared at the New York Lyceum in Off the Stage where he imitated a number of popular actors of the period.
In 1878, he co-founded the Boston Elks lodge, and his association with the lodge, and that of his manager in the 1880s, George W. Floyd, would change baseball history, giving us arguably the first role of an agent in baseball history. Floyd, in particular, would serve as a go-between, starting in 1887, between the management of the Boston National League club, the Beaneaters, and its newly signed star, Mike "King" Kelly. In 1889, Goodwin became a member of the governing committee of the newly created Actors' Amateur Athletic Association of America.
When Kelly and his Chicago teammates won the pennant in 1885, Goodwin and Floyd treated the Chicago team to a performance of "The Skating Rink" at Hooley’s Theater in Chicago. "After the overture the orchestra struck up 'See, the Conquering Hero Comes,' and Mr. Floyd conducted the eleven Chicago players to their boxes," [Chicago captain-manager Cap] Anson in the lead." After the first act, Goodwin presented Anson with a "solid silver facsimile of a League ball."
A hit in the burlesque Black-eyed Susan led to Goodwin's taking part in Rice and Goodwin's Evangeline company. It was at this time that he married Eliza Weathersby (d. 1887), an English actress with whom he played in B. E. Woollf's Hobbies. It was not until 1889, however, that Nat Goodwin's talent as a comedian of the legitimate type began to be recognized. From that time he appeared in a number of plays designed to display his drily humorous method, such as Brander Matthew's and George H. Jessop's A Gold Mine, Henry Guy Carleton's A Gilded Fool and Ambition, H. V. Esmond's When We Were Twenty-one, and others. He also found success in more serious works such as Augustus Thomas's In Mizzoura and Clyde Fitch's Nathan Hale. Until 1903 he was associated in his performances with his third wife, the actress Maxine Elliott (born 1873), whom he married in 1898; this marriage was dissolved in 1908. From 1905 to 1910, he partnered with Edna Goodrich in a string of comedy hits- they were married from 1908 to 1911.
A chance trip to Goldfield, Nevada to witness a prize fight led to Goodwin's involvement in promoting mining stocks in association with George Graham Rice. Goodwin quit his partnership with Rice shortly before the latter was arrested for mail fraud.[1]
He acted in a handful of films between 1912 and 1916, including the first feature-length version of Oliver Twist, in which he played Fagin.
He died in New York City.
[edit] Publications
- Winter, The Wallet of Time, (New York, 1913)
- Strang, Famous Actors of the Day in America, (Boston, 1900)
- McKay and Wingate, Famous American Actors of To-Day, (New York, 1896)
- Nat Goodwin's Book, (Boston, 1914), (autobiographical)
[edit] References
- ^ Dan Plazak A Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top (2006) ISBN 978-0-87480-840-7
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Hartnoll, Phyllis, ed. The Oxford Skeet Skeet to the Theatre. 4th edition. London:Oxford UP, 1983. p. 342.
Rosenberg, Howard W., Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly: U.S. Team Sport's First Media Sensation and Baseball's Original Casey at the Bat (Arlington, Virginia: Tile Books, 2004)
