Lucile Charles

Lucile Marie Hoerr Charles (August 13, 1903 – March 7, 1965) was an American theatre professional, college professor, and folklorist whose career spanned Broadway performance, academic instruction, and scholarly publication. Born in Chicago to Charles Ferdinand Hoerr and Lillie Anna Sophia Obermann Hoerr, she adopted her father's first name, Charles, as her own surname in adulthood. Her younger brother Stanley went on to become a prominent surgeon. As a girl she studied piano, and she later graduated from the University of Chicago in 1930, where she contributed writing to the Daily Maroon.

Charles began her professional life in New York City, working at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House from 1930 to 1934. During this period she appeared on Broadway in the play Life Begins in 1932, and produced a radio drama series titled The Land of Plenty. She also published early career-oriented pieces, including "Snaring the Elusive Broadway Job" in 1930 and "So You're Going on the Stage" in 1931. From 1934 to 1936 she taught at the American Peoples College in Europe, and contributed the article "And for a Backdrop the Tyrolean Alps!" in 1935. Returning to New York, she worked in the drama and speech department at Teachers College, Columbia University from 1937 to 1939.

Charles pursued advanced degrees while building her career. She earned master's degrees from Columbia University in 1941 and Yale University in 1942, then completed a Ph.D. in educational psychology at Yale in 1943. From 1955 to 1957 she held a Bollingen Foundation fellowship for study at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich.

Her academic appointments began at Mary Washington College, where she served on the faculty from 1943 to 1946, before joining East Carolina University as a professor of English. She became a full professor there in 1959 and served as the institution's first director of dramatic arts. In that role she directed three major productions per term as well as weekly one-act plays, produced radio programs, and directed an annual children's play at East Carolina Playhouse. She also founded the Eastern Regional Play Festival, a campus-based event that drew theatre professionals from across the region.

Charles's scholarly writing concentrated on the intersection of drama and ritual, with particular attention to clowns. Her publications include "The Clown's Function" (1945), "Regeneration Through Drama at Death" (1948), "Drama in First-Naming Ceremonies" (1951), "Drama in Shaman Exorcism" (1953), and "Drama in War" (1955). She also published "Growing up Through Drama" (1946) and a collection of fables, The Story of the Baby Sphinx and Other Fables, in 1959.

Later in life Charles wrote openly about her experience with Guillain-Barré disease, publishing "Morale in Recovering from Guillain-Barré Disease: Account of an Ex-patient" in 1961. She also addressed the practical matter of adhesive bandage removal in "Removing the Patient from the Tape" (1960) and "How to avoid pain in removing adhesive tape" (1961). She died on March 7, 1965, at the Cleveland Clinic at the age of 61, the same institution where her brother Stanley worked as a surgeon. Her papers are held in the manuscript collection of East Carolina University.