Chrystal Herne

Katherine Chrystal Herne was born on June 16, 1883, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the middle daughter of actor and playwright James A. Herne and his wife, Katherine Corcoran. Her mother had been an actress herself, having met James Herne while performing in San Francisco, and the name Chrystal was drawn from a role Katherine Corcoran played in Hearts of Oak, a play James Herne co-wrote with David Belasco in 1879. Chrystal's older sister Julie Herne became an actress and Hollywood talent scout, while a younger sister, Dorothy Lucille Herne, appeared on stage before her death in 1921, and a younger brother, John Temple Herne, performed on stage in his youth before serving as a naval ensign in World War I and later joining the publishing firm Charles Scribner's Sons. An older sister, Alma, died young.

Herne made her stage debut in Washington, D.C., at the age of sixteen, playing Sue Hardy in her father's play The Reverend Griffith Davenport. Over the next two seasons she appeared as Jane Cauldwell in Sag Harbor, her father's final play, which also featured her father and her sister Julie in principal roles. James Herne died in early June 1901. Following his death, Chrystal returned for a third season in Sag Harbor, this time taking over her sister's role as the heroine Martha Reese. Later that same season she played Helen Berry in Shore Acres, one of her father's most celebrated works.

In 1903 Herne joined the company of E. H. Sothern, playing Huguette in If I Were King and Gertrude in Hamlet. In early 1905 she appeared in special matinee performances of Richter's Wife, portraying a jealous wife troubled by her conductor husband's attention to a young protégé played by her sister Julie, who also wrote the piece. During the 1905–06 season Herne took on the title role in Arnold Daly's production of Shaw's Candida, a performance for which she was long remembered. She then played Vera Revendal opposite Walker Whiteside in Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot, which debuted in 1908 at the Columbia Theatre in Washington, D.C., before reaching Broadway. In 1911 she was well received as Diana opposite Dustin Farnum in a revival of The Squaw Man at the Broadway Theatre.

Over a Broadway career spanning 1900 to 1936, Herne appeared in nearly forty productions, among them You Never Can Tell, An Exchange of Wives, Polygamy, and At Bay. The most celebrated role of her later career came in 1925, when she created the title character in George Kelly's Craig's Wife, opposite Charles Trowbridge, produced at the Morosco Theatre. Kelly's play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Herne's final Broadway appearance was as Beatrice Crandall in A Room in Red and White, staged at the 46th Street Theatre in January and February 1936.

Chrystal Herne died on September 19, 1950, following a month's illness at the Phillips House, a private care facility at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and was cremated. She was survived by her husband, Harold S. Pollard, a former chief editorial writer for the New York World, her sister Julie, and her brother John Temple Herne. Her mother, Katherine Corcoran Herne, had died in 1943 at the age of eighty-six.