Joseph R. Grismer

Joseph Rhode Grismer (November 4, 1849 – 1922) was an American stage actor, playwright, theatrical director, and producer whose Broadway career spanned from 1880 to 1895. Born in Albany, New York, the middle child among three girls and two boys raised by Irish immigrants Christopher and Bridget Grismer, though later records suggest his birth parents may have been Valentine Grismer and Adelaide Huda. As a youth Grismer attended the Albany Boys Academy and, following graduation, served with the 192nd New York Volunteer Regiment during the final months of the American Civil War. His return to Albany after the war led him to the Histrionic Amateur Dramatic Club, where he discovered his vocation as a performer.

Grismer made his professional stage debut in Albany around 1870, and by 1873 had advanced to principal roles at the Grand Opera House in Cincinnati. There he performed in hundreds of stock productions, appearing alongside such figures as Charlotte Cushman, Laura Keene, Edward Loomis Davenport, Edwin Adams, Lawrence Barrett, Lilian Adelaide Neilson, John Edward McCullough, Charles Albert Fechter, and Charles James Mathews. In 1877 he relocated to San Francisco, where he took on leading roles at the Grand Opera House, the California Theatre, and the Baldwin Theatre. At the Baldwin he met Welsh actress Phoebe Davies, who had gained recognition there playing Hortense in a production of Dickens' Bleak House. The two married in San Francisco on June 1, 1882, and subsequently formed the Grismer-Davies Organization, a stock company that performed throughout California and across the western regions of North America.

The Grismer-Davies Organization mounted an extensive repertoire. Among the productions Grismer wrote and performed in were Monte Cristo, an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, and Called Back, drawn from the book by Hugh Conway. The company also performed Editha's Burglar by Frances Hodgson Burnett; The Midnight Bell by Charles Hale Hoyt; the Bartley Campbell play Fairfax; Lights and Shadows by Henry Leslie; The World Against Her and The Wages of Sin, both by Frank Harvey Sr.; The Tigress by Ramsey Morris; The Long Strike and The Streets of New York by Dion Boucicault, with Grismer and Davies playing Tom Badger and Alida Bloodgood in the latter; Lester Wallack's Rosedale; Enoch Arden, adapted from the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson; and The Calthorpe Case, a melodrama by Arthur Goodrich.

In 1893 Grismer and Davies embarked on an extended tour of major Eastern cities in The New South, an original melodrama Grismer co-wrote with Clay M. Greene set in the American South a generation after the Civil War, with the two playing Captain Harry Ford and Georgia Gwynne respectively. The play was later adapted for film in 1916, with Carlyle Blackwell and Ethel Clayton in the lead roles. The couple's Broadway credits also include Poor Humanity and The Upper Crust, and on February 4, 1895, they opened at the Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York in the Sutton Vane Sr. play Humanity, portraying Lt. Bevis Cranbourne and Alma Dunbar.

Among Grismer's most enduring achievements was his collaboration with producer William A. Brady, a former member of his California company, in acquiring the rights to Lottie Blair Parker's pastoral play Way Down East. Grismer revised the work, and with Davies in the lead role of Anna Moore opposite Howard Kyle as David Bartlett, the production debuted on September 3, 1897, in Providence, Rhode Island, before opening in New York the following month at the Manhattan Theatre. Though initially met with a lukewarm reception, Way Down East built steadily in popularity over nearly ten seasons, with estimates placing its total earnings at around one million dollars and Grismer's share at approximately three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Grismer later novelized the work, and it was produced as a motion picture on four occasions between 1908 and 1935. In 1899 Grismer also wrote and co-produced Manicure, adapted from the French play by André Sylvane and Louis Artus.

Grismer and Brady continued to collaborate on Broadway productions, their most successful being A Gentleman from Mississippi by Harrison Rhodes and Thomas A. Wise, which ran for 407 performances at the Bijou Theatre during the 1908–09 season. In his later years Grismer served as a director of the Commercial Trust Company and treasurer of the Gulf Fisheries Company. He held the presidency of the Actors' Order of Friendship and the vice-presidency of the Actors' Fund of America, and was a member of The Players, the American Dramatists' Club, the Green Room Club, the Bohemian Club, and the Manhasset Bay and Larchmont Yacht clubs. He served two terms as shepherd of the Lambs Theatrical Club, from 1911 to 1913 and again from 1917 to 1918, during which the clubhouse doubled in size, and he remained on the Council of the Lambs Club for the remainder of his life.

Phoebe Davies died on December 4, 1912, at the couple's home in Larchmont, New York, following a year-long illness. Grismer died nearly a decade later after being struck by a car while crossing Broadway at 106th Street in Manhattan. He was survived by his wife Olive Chamberlain Grismer, their daughter Olive, and a son, Conrad, from his first marriage.