Emery Battis

Emery Battis (May 30, 1915 – September 20, 2011) was an American stage actor, historian, and author whose performing career stretched from 1933 to 2006, spanning nearly eight decades. Born in Arlington, Massachusetts, he died in Marlborough, Massachusetts, at the age of ninety-six.

Battis earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1942 and subsequently served in the Army Air Forces during World War II. During that period he appeared on Broadway in Moss Hart's Winged Victory, which was later adapted into a film of the same name. Following the war, he pursued graduate study at Columbia University, completing a master's degree in 1948 and a doctorate in history in 1958. He taught colonial history at Rutgers University from 1948 to 1968, retiring from academia in his fifties to pursue acting on a full-time basis. His scholarly work produced Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a book on Anne Hutchinson that received an award from the Institute of Early American History and Culture in 1963.

His Broadway career ran from 1946 to 1974 and encompassed productions including Alice in Wonderland, Winged Victory, King Henry V, King Henry VIII, What Every Woman Knows, John Gabriel Borkman, A Pound on Demand, Androcles and the Lion, Yellow Jack, The House of Atreus, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and The National Health. Battis was known for his ability to portray multiple characters within a single production and for his skill with makeup and other techniques that allowed him to alter his appearance substantially from role to role.

Much of his career was devoted to Shakespeare. Of the thirty-seven plays in Shakespeare's canon, Battis appeared in all but one, Cymbeline, performing numerous roles with the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. The New York Times described him as "very good as a weary, cautious Banquo" in a production of Macbeth, and for his portrayal of Sorin in Anton Chekhov's The Sea Gull the same publication wrote that he "turns the enfeebled Sorin's wheelchair into a touching metaphor for the gravitational pull of old age." In a 1993 interview with Washingtonian Magazine, Battis named King Lear as his favorite Shakespearean role, citing the latitude it offered for invention. The Cleveland Plain Dealer had declared him "the best Lear of our generation" in the 1960s. His final stage appearance came in 2006, when he performed in Love's Labour's Lost in Stratford-upon-Avon at the age of ninety-one.

Beyond the stage, Battis had television credits that included St. Elsewhere, The Adams Chronicles, and Great Performances. He lived in Washington, D.C., for more than twenty-five years and volunteered at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2002 he received the Helen Hayes Award for lifetime contributions to Washington theatre, and the Emery Battis Award was established in his name. His first marriage, to Elaine Cunningham, produced five children. His second wife was Elizabeth Neuman; he also had three stepchildren, twelve grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.