Edith Barrett

Edith Barrett (born Edith Barrett Williams, January 19, 1907 – February 22, 1977) was an American stage, film, and television actress who performed on Broadway from 1925 to 1939. A native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, she was the daughter of Marshall S. P. Williams and Edith Barrett Williams, and a granddaughter of Lawrence Barrett, the 19th-century American tragedian.

Barrett entered the entertainment industry at age 16 through Walter Hampden's production of Cyrano de Bergerac. She returned to work with Hampden at age 19 in Caponsacchi (1926), playing Pompelia in what became her first starring role. The production ran for five seasons. Her Broadway career spanned more than two dozen productions, and she became associated during the 1930s with a cohort of prominent stage actresses that included Eva Le Gallienne, Katherine Cornell, and Helen Gahagan. Her theatrical repertoire drew on works by James M. Barrie, William Shakespeare, Noël Coward, Robert Browning, A. A. Milne, and George Bernard Shaw, and she was active in the Little Theatre Movement through New England summer stock.

Among her most recognized stage roles was Sara Moonlight in Benn Levy's 1929 play Mrs. Moonlight, which she toured nationally and performed more than 500 times. Following the New York opening, the New York Times published a review of her performance under the headline "A Star Is Born." In 1934, she portrayed Anne Brontë in the premiere of Dan Totheroh's Moor Born, a drama centered on the Brontë sisters. Two years later, she took on the role of Katherine O'Shea, the romantic lead in Elsie Schauffler's Parnell, a drama about Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell. Former New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson described her work in that role as one of the best performances, if not the best, of her career.

During the 1930s, Barrett performed as a member of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre troupe. While appearing as Sibil in the Mercury Theatre's 1937 production of The Shoemaker's Holiday, she met actor Vincent Price, who played the leading role. The two married in 1938. Barrett relocated to Southern California with Price in late 1939, and in 1940 the couple had their only child together, author, poet, and environmental activist Vincent Barrett Price, known as V. B. Price. The marriage ended in 1948.

Barrett's complete Broadway credits include Trelawny of the "Wells" (1925), Hamlet (1925), The Merchant of Venice (1925), Cyrano de Bergerac (1926), The Servant in the House (1926), King Henry IV, Part I (1926), The Immortal Thief (1926), Caponsacchi (1926), The Phantom Lover (1928), Becky Sharp (1929), Michael and Mary (1929), Mrs. Moonlight (1930), Troilus and Cressida (1932), The Perfect Marriage (1932), Strange Orchestra (1933), Moor Born (1934), Allure (1934), Piper Paid (1934), Symphony (1935), Parnell (1936), Wise Tomorrow (1937), The Shoemakers' Holiday (1938), and Wuthering Heights (1939).

Her film career began in 1941 with Ladies in Retirement, a film noir directed by Charles Vidor, in which she played one of two half-sisters to Ida Lupino's character. Her most recognized screen role came in the 1943 RKO horror film I Walked with a Zombie, in which she played Mrs. Rand, the mother-in-law of the central character. That same year she appeared in Jane Eyre, and the following year she was cast as Mrs. Fairfax in 20th Century-Fox's adaptation of the same novel. She appeared briefly alongside Price in both The Song of Bernadette (1943) and Keys of the Kingdom (1944). Her film work concluded with a minor role in The Swan (1956), bringing her total filmography to more than 20 films.

In the mid-1950s, Barrett transitioned to television, taking on character roles in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and later appearing in Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, Lux Video Theatre, and Northwest Passage. In 1958, she played Sarah Barnhart in a Telephone Time episode titled Recipe for Success. In her later years, Barrett devoted considerable effort to supporting fellow New York stage actresses who faced difficulties finding work in film and television. She lived in Santa Monica, California from 1946 to 1976. Barrett died on February 22, 1977, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the age of 70, near her son V. B. Price and his family.