Haila Stoddard

Haila Stoddard (November 14, 1913 – February 21, 2011) was an American actress, producer, writer, and director whose career spanned stage, television, and radio across several decades. Born in Great Falls, Montana, she relocated with her family from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles at the age of eight and graduated from high school in 1930. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in speech from the University of Southern California in 1934, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, while performing in leading roles with the National Collegiate Players.

Stoddard's professional stage debut came in San Francisco in 1934, when she began as a walk-on and understudy in a production of Merrily We Roll Along before assuming the ingenue's leading role for the Los Angeles opening night. She spent 65 weeks in 1935 and 1936 playing the mute Pearl in the national touring company of Jack Kirkland's Tobacco Road. She arrived on Broadway in 1937, succeeding Peggy Conklin in Yes, My Darling Daughter, and went on to appear in A Woman's a Fool – To Be Clever, I Know What I Like, and Kindred, all in 1939, followed by Susannah and the Elders in 1940, Mr. and Mrs. North in 1941, The Rivals in 1942, The Moon Vine and Blithe Spirit in 1943, Dream Girl in 1945, and The Voice of the Turtle in 1947. During World War II she toured the South Pacific in a 1945 USO production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, playing Lorraine Sheldon. Her Broadway work continued through productions including Joan of Lorraine, The Trial of Mary Dugan, Rip Van Winkle in 1947 and 1948, Goodbye My Fancy, Her Cardboard Lover in 1949, Affairs of State in 1950, Springtime for Henry in 1951, Twentieth Century, Glad Tidings, and Biography in 1952. She co-produced The Frogs of Spring on Broadway in 1953 with her then-husband Harald Bromley. When illness prevented Constance Ford from opening in One Eye Closed, Stoddard stepped into the leading role on opening night of her own Broadway production. She also took over for Mary Anderson in Lunatics and Lovers in 1954 and subsequently directed the national touring production of that play. Additional Broadway credits include Doctor Social, The Rivalry, and the comedy Patate, with her Broadway career extending from 1937 to 1962.

Stoddard and Jack Kirkland were original shareholders in the founding of the Bucks County Playhouse in 1938, and she appeared there in sixteen productions between 1939 and 1958, among them The Philadelphia Story, Golden Boy, The Play's the Thing, Petticoat Fever, Our Betters, Skylark, and Mr. and Mrs. North. Over five seasons at the Playhouse she served as leading lady opposite Walter Slezak and Louis Calhern. In 1953 she was engaged as leading lady for the Elitch Theatre summer stock company, where she performed opposite Whitfield Connor, and she appeared in ten summer stock productions at Denver's Elitch Gardens Theatre.

As a producer, Stoddard formed Bonard Productions Incorporated in 1960 with Colorado heiress Helen Bonfils, the company name combining the first three letters of Bonfils with the last three letters of Stoddard. Working alongside New York theatrical attorney Donald Seawell, she became the first producer to bring the work of James Thurber and Harold Pinter to Broadway. Her inaugural Broadway production, A Thurber Carnival, won the Tony Award for Best Musical, and she subsequently produced Noël Coward's Sail Away in 1962, for which she received a Tony Award nomination for Best Producer of a Musical. A later staging of A Thurber Carnival at the Central City Opera House featured Thurber himself, then blind, serving as narrator. In 1962 Stoddard asked Andy Warhol, whom she had learned of through choreographer John Butler, to design costumes for her Broadway production of Thurber's The Beast in Me. Bonard's subsequent Broadway productions included The Affair by C. P. Snow in 1962, The Beast in Me in 1963, and the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Hollow Crown in 1963, which toured American colleges for four months in the spring of 1964. Bonard also presented the RSC productions of King Lear and Comedy of Errors to open the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in May 1964. London productions of A Thurber Carnival in 1962 and Sail Away in 1963 both played the Savoy Theatre in the West End. In 1967, working with Mark Wright and Leonard S. Field, Stoddard premiered Harold Pinter on Broadway with The Birthday Party. Her off-Broadway producing credits included Noël Coward's Private Lives in 1968, Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky in 1970 and The Gingham Dog in 1971, and The Last Sweet Days of Isaac in 1970, a musical by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford that won three Obie Awards. She also produced The Survival of St. Joan in 1971 with Neal Du Brock, Lady Audley's Secret in 1972 and Love in 1984 with Arnold H. Levy, and off-Broadway productions of Glass House in 1981, Catholic School Girls in 1982, Sweet Prince and Marvelous Gray in 1982, and John Olive's Clara's Play in 1983.

As a writer, Stoddard adapted Come Play with Me, co-adapting it with dancer-actress Tamara Geva from Marcel Achard's Voulez vous jouer avec moi?, and adapted Men, Women, and Less Alarming Creatures and That Hat!, her version of The Italian Straw Hat, presented in 1964. She wrote original plays including A Round with Ring in 1969, an adaptation of Ring Lardner works that she also directed, and Zellerman, Arthur in 1979. Her dramatic adaptations of Thurber material include Life on a Limb and Men, Women, and Less Alarming Creatures, produced alongside The Last Flower for Boston's WGBH-TV public television in 1965. She also produced her husband's plays The Clover Ring and Georgia Boy in Boston and The Secret Room on Broadway, all in 1945.

On television, Stoddard is best known for playing Pauline Rysdale on CBS's The Secret Storm for sixteen years, from 1954 to 1970. During the early era of live dramatic television in the 1950s she appeared in more than 100 teleplays in principal roles on programs including CBS's Playhouse 90, Studio One, The Web, The United States Steel Hour, and Hallmark Hall of Fame, as well as NBC's Goodyear Playhouse, Kraft Theatre, The Philco Television Playhouse, The Armstrong Circle Theatre, and Robert Montgomery Presents. On radio she played the Little Sister opposite Orson Welles on CBS's Big Sister, and between 1937 and 1939 she simultaneously performed in Stella Dallas and three other daytime radio serials while appearing on stage in three different plays.

Stoddard married William Gude on October 30, 1931; that marriage ended in divorce in 1935. On April 3, 1938, she married Jack Kirkland, with whom she had two children, and the couple divorced on September 2, 1947. Later that year, on November 8, she married director-producer Harald Bromley, with whom she had one child; they divorced in 1954. Having met Whitfield Connor at the Elitch Theatre in 1953, she married him in New York City on January 26, 1956, and the two remained married until his death in 1988. In the late 1960s Stoddard opened Carriage House Comestibles, a gourmet restaurant off the Boston Post Road in Westport, Connecticut, and she also drafted a cookbook entitled Applause.