The Horror, Inc. Radio Program Log

The Horror, Inc. Radio Program Biographies

From the June 6, 1991 Indiana Gazette:

EVA LE GALLIENNE Pioneering U.S. actress dies at 92

     WESTON, Conn. (AP) -- Eva Le Gallienne, a pioneering actress, director and producer whose career in the American theater spanned eight decades has died at age 92.
     Le Gallienne died at home Monday of heart failure, said a longtime friend, Anne Kaufman Schneider.
     She made her American acting debut in 1915, playing Rose in"Mrs Boltay's Daughters."
  She last appeared on the stage as the White Queen in the 1982 broadway production of "Alice In Wonderland," a play she also directed and co-wrote.
  The revival ran only 22 performances before closing.
     Le Gallienne is credited with opening the first successful American theater company, the Civic Repertory Theatre, in 1926.
     "She was something of a pioneer in the American theater," Schneider said Tuesday.
  "(She was) a very idealistic person, very strong person who stuck to her guns and her way of life, all her life."
     In 1921, Le Gallienne gained fame for her role as Julie in "Liliom."
  Two years later, she got star billing for her portrayal of Princess Alexandra in "The Swan."
     Her career as a producer began in the 1925-26 season, when she produced and starred in "The Master Builder" and "John Gabriel Borkman."
     She established the Civic Repertory Theatre with the idea of offering audiences low-priced productions of classics.
     She directed and appeared in many of the company's productions, including "Twelfth Night," "Peter Pan" and her first rendition of the White Queen in "Alice In Wonderland."
  The theater company dissolved during the Depression in 1934.
     "It ran out of money and steam," Schneider said.
     One of Le Gallienne's biggest successes was a play called "Uncle Harry," which opened on Broadway in 1942.
  The Drama, which also starred Joseph Schildkraut, ran for over a year in New York and later toured for six months.
     In 1946, Le Gallienne tried again to open another reportory theater company, this time with director Margaret Webster and producer Cheryl Crawford.

Eva Le Gallienne was born in 1899, the daughter of poet Richard Le Gallienne. Throughout her formative years it was famed actress, Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) that was her idol. Eva Le Gallienne made her own debut on the London stage in 1914 at the age of 15 in Monna Vanna. At the age of 16 Eva traveled with her mother to New York. By 1916 she was making her Broadway debut in 16 performances of Bunny (January 1916). Her debut in London in 1914 and her final appearance on the Broadway stage in To Grandmother's House We Go (1981) spanned a stage career of over sixty-seven years. Fittingly enough, her last appearance on Broadway also garnered her yet another Tony nomination.

Over almost seven decades in the Theatre, Eva Le Gallienne was noted as much for her roles as stage coach, director, producer and stage manager as she was for her own marvelous and gifted appearances behind the footlights. One of the more idealistic--perhaps most idealistic--directors of the New York Stage, Eva Le Gallienne devoted herself to inspiring new playwrights, translating the plays of Henrik Ibsen, and continually promoting improvements in the quality of American stage work throughout her storied career.

She ran ran her own 1100-seat, Civic Repertory Theatre (the '14th Street Theater') for 10 years (1926-1936), producing 37 plays. The theater was also home to her Civic Repertory Theater Company whose actors included, initially, herself, J. Edward Bromberg, Paul Leyssac, Florida Friebus, and Leona Roberts. The rolls of her famed students would later include Radio's own Barton Yarborough, Staats Cotsworth, Burgess Meredith, and Joseph Schildkraut, among scores of others.

Le Gallienne's own growing repetoire of theatre portrayals would include everything from Peter Pan to Hamlet. In spite of almost completely avoiding Film, she did appear in a handful of Film roles spanning some thirty years. Beginning as Gertrude in the 1955 treatement of Prince of Players with young Richard Burton as Hamlet, and ending with a marvelously evocative performance as Grandma Pearl in 1980's Resurrection with Ellen Burstyn, Le Gallienne's rare big screen appearances were extraordinary treats for four generations of Film audiences

Eva Le Gallienne's Television appearances were somewhat more frequent, by comparison. Themselves spanning thirty-six years, Le Gallienne's TV appearances were restricted to some of the finest and most prestigious playhouse-drama anthologies to air during the Golden Age of Television. Ranging from The Ford Theatre Hour to Playhouse 90 and Play of the Week, Eva Le Gallienne's rare appearances on Television were met with great fanfare and advance promotion and were invariably great critical successes. Her last Television appearance was in the Emmy-winning St. Elsewhere episode The Women, from 1984, in which she portrayed Evelyn Milbourne.

Among her many awards, she won The Pulitzer Prize for her production of Alison's House by Susan Glaspell; the National Medal of Arts from President Reagan, and the Norwegian Grand Cross for her furthering the presentation of plays by Henrik Ibsen.

• Norma Talmadge in The Song of Love (1923)
• Seena Owen in Shipwrecked (1926)
• Marguerite De La Motte in Meet the Prince (1926)
• Bessie Love in Young April (1926)
• Lya De Putti in The Heart Thief (1927)
• Jetta Goudal in The Forbidden Woman (1927)

In addition to working with the era's greatest actresses, the 1920s found him appearing in the Cecil B. DeMille epics, The Road to Yesterday (1925) and The King of Kings (1927), the latter as Judas Iscariot, with father Rudolf Schildkraut in the role of high priest Caiaphas.

Joseph had met his first wife, actress Elise Bartlett, while appearing in Peer Gynt (1923) on Broadway. Already widely known as a lothario of some legend, Joseph Schildkraut reportedly overwhelmed the young actress, proposing to her the day he met her, and marrying her the following week. The two were married only two years. Schildkraut's second marriage--to Marie McKay--was far more successful, lasting almost thirty years.

When talkies arrived, Schildkraut's commanding voice and natural Stage presence provided him an easy transition into talking pictures. Schildkraut appeared as Gaylord Ravenal in the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein musical, Show Boat (1929) opposite Laura La Plante. With the Great Depression decimating Stage finances, Schildkraut reluctantly moved to Los Angeles and the Film industry, despite his enduring love of The Stage. The move to Film made Schildkraut one of Hollywood's most durable and distinctive character actors for two decades.

During the 1930s, Schildkraut compiled an impressive resume of some of the era's most memorable character roles:

• Wallace Beery's nemesis, General Pascal in MGM's Viva Villa! (1934)
• King Herod opposite Claudette Colbert in Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra (1934)
• Conrad, Marquis of Montferratin, in Cecil B DeMille's The Crusades (1935)
• An Oscar-winning performance for his portrayal of Captain Dreyfus, in the biopic The Life of Emile Zola (1937).

By the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, Schildkraut became a Hollywood fixture appearing in:

• Marie Antoinette (1938)
• The Three Musketeers (1939)
• The Man in the Iron Mask (1939)
• Monsieur Beaucaire (1946)
• Lancer Spy (1937)
• Suez (1938)
• The Rains Came (1939)
• The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
• Clash by Night (1941) with Tallulah Bankhead
• Uncle Harry (1942)
• The Cherry Orchard (1944) with Eva Le Gallienne.

But it was a career misstep--signing with Republic Pictures--that threatened to end his rising arc of Film fame. Though financially rewarding, Republic mis-cast Schildkraut in a series of unremarkable features.

It was during the Republic years that Schildkraut undertook several years of memorable Radio appearances. Schildkraut's fame made each of his Radio appearances events, and the Networks used his appearances as anchors for many of their more prestigious or patriotic programs throughout the 1940s.

Schildkraut hosted his own program, Intrigue (1946) for CBS as a Summer production. He either hosted or appeared in six of the series' seven productions. Schildkraut also appeared in The Miracle Of The Danube for Columbia Workshop (1942), in the stirring final production of Dear Adolph (1942), in We Refuse to Die (1942), the Thirty For One, Hostages, and My Favorite Nazi episodes of Treasury Star Parade (1943), in Diary Of A Saboteur for Cavalcade of America (1943), in Peter Ibbetson, A Passage to India, and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe for NBC University Theatre (1948-1949), as well as reprising his 1942 performance in Uncle Harry for Best Plays (1952). The clear common denominator for these Radio productions was Schildkraut's gift for protraying heroic or sympathetic figures from the wartime struggles in Europe.

He wasn't through on Stage either. Indeed his greatest Stage triumph came with his role as Otto Frank in 1955's The Diary of Anne Frank. Schildkraut reprised the role in the Film version of The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), but unaccountably failed to achieve even an Academy nomination for his remarkable performance.

Schildkraut's ultimate Film role came as Nicodemus in the religious epic, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). The film was released after Schildkraut's death in 1964.

Schildkraut's Television career was rarely the equal of his Stage and Film careers, although he did distinguish himself in several memorable Television roles, among them, Claudius to Maurice Evans' Hamlet (1953) and remarkable appearances as Alfred Becker in Death's Head Revisited (1961) and as John Holt in The Trade-Ins (1962), two of The Twilight Zone's most memorable episodes. Sadly, Schildkraut's wife of twenty-nine years, Marie McKay, died during the taping of The Trade-Ins. Schildkraut reportedly completed the episode before allowing himself the luxury of mourning the loss of his beloved partner.

Schildkraut was married one last time, in 1963, to Leonora Rogers. Joseph Schildkraut died of a heart attack a few months later at his New York City home on January 21, 1964, at the age of 68. Joseph Schildkraut is interred in the Beth Olam Mausoleum of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.