Laurette Taylor

Laurette Taylor, born Loretta Helen Cooney on April 1, 1883, in New York City, was an American stage and silent film actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1909 to 1945. Of Irish heritage, she was the daughter of James and Elizabeth Cooney and had a younger sister, Elizabeth. She is particularly remembered for originating the role of Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.

Taylor married her first husband, Charles Alonzo Taylor, on May 1, 1901, when she was eighteen years old. He was nearly two decades her senior and had been born in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The marriage produced two children, Dwight Oliver Taylor and Marguerite Courtney, before the couple divorced around 1910. On December 22, 1912, Taylor married British-born playwright J. Hartley Manners, a union that would shape much of her professional life. Because Manners was a foreign national, Taylor lost her United States citizenship upon marrying him. Following his death in 1928, she regained her citizenship through naturalization on September 11, 1930, receiving certificate number 3234876. Her petition recorded that she had not acquired any other nationality by affirmative act.

Taylor made her Broadway debut in The Great John Ganton in 1908 and went on to appear in productions including Alias Jimmy Valentine, Seven Sisters, Lola Lola, The Bird of Paradise, The Ringmaster, and One Night in Rome, among others. She also performed in The Wooing of Eve and a special production titled Laurette Taylor in Scenes From Shakespeare, in which she performed scenes from Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew. New York Times theatre critic Brooks Atkinson credited The Girl in Waiting, which opened in 1910, as the production that made her a star.

Her most celebrated stage success was Peg o' My Heart, written for her by Manners. The play opened on Broadway on December 20, 1912, and ran through May 1914, accumulating 607 performances and setting a new Broadway record for a dramatic play. Taylor and Manners earned approximately ten thousand dollars per week from the production. After the Broadway run closed, Taylor starred in the London production until German zeppelin bombing forced its closure in 1915. She later toured the United States in a revival of the play, which reopened at the Cort Theater on February 14, 1921, and ran for an additional 692 performances. The success of Peg o' My Heart also led to a 1922 film version starring Taylor and directed by King Vidor, a six-reel print of which survives in the Motion Picture Division of the Library of Congress.

In 1917, Taylor appeared in Out There, another vehicle written by Manners, in which she played a Cockney waif who becomes a uniformed Red Cross nurse through patriotism and idealism. A line from the play became the headline of an armed forces recruiting poster. The following year she starred in Happiness, a Manners-written comedy about a Brooklyn errand girl who teaches a wealthy customer the secret of happiness. In 1924, she reprised the role in a film version of Happiness directed by King Vidor, with a cast that included Hedda Hopper and Pat O'Malley. That same year she starred in a film adaptation of One Night in Rome, in which she played the dual role of Duchess Mareno and Madame Enigme. Taylor kept a personal print of the film and showed it repeatedly to guests at her home.

Also in 1924, Taylor appeared in the Broadway production In a Garden. By the mid-1920s, public taste had shifted, and the formulaic plays in which Taylor had excelled lost favor with audiences. Manners wrote The National Anthem for her in 1922, a play intended to rebuke the jazz generation, but it failed. It was the last production Taylor appeared in that was written by her husband. Taylor suffered from severe alcoholism for many years, which significantly limited her stage appearances from the late 1920s onward. In 1938, she headed the cast in a revival of Outward Bound.

Taylor's return to prominence came with her performance in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie in 1944, in which she originated the role of Amanda Wingfield. The performance received nearly unanimous acclaim and earned her the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Actress of the season. In 1945, she was voted best actress in a poll conducted by Variety. Taylor died on December 7, 1946.