William Gillette

William Hooker Gillette, born on July 24, 1853, in Nook Farm, Hartford, Connecticut, was an American actor, playwright, director, and stage manager whose Broadway career extended from 1894 to 1936. He died on April 29, 1937. The Hartford neighborhood where he grew up was a literary and intellectual community whose residents included Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles Dudley Warner. His father, Francis Gillette, had served as a United States Senator and was an advocate for public education, temperance, the abolition of slavery, and women's suffrage. His mother, Elisabeth Daggett Hooker, was a descendant of the Reverend Thomas Hooker, the Puritan leader credited with founding Hartford and with authoring or inspiring the first written constitution to form a government. Gillette had three brothers and a sister; a second sister, Mary, died in childhood. His eldest brother, Frank Ashbell Gillette, died in California in 1859 from tuberculosis. His brother Robert served in the Union Army during the Antietam campaign, later transferred to the Navy, was assigned to the U.S.S. Gettysburg, participated in both assaults on Fort Fisher, and was killed the morning after the fort's surrender when its powder magazine exploded. His brother Edward relocated to Iowa and his sister Elizabeth married George Henry Warner, both in 1863, leaving William as the only child remaining in the household.

At the age of twenty, Gillette left Hartford to pursue an acting career. He worked briefly for a stock company in New Orleans before returning to New England, where, on Mark Twain's personal recommendation, he made his debut at the Globe Theater in Boston in 1875, appearing in Twain's stage adaptation of The Gilded Age. He subsequently spent six years as a stock actor working through Boston, New York, and the Midwest, attending classes at several institutions without completing any of their programs. His father had objected to the theater but offered minimal resistance to his son's ambitions, providing him with a living allowance during his unpaid apprenticeship. When Francis Gillette's health declined in 1878, William left the stage for more than a year to care for him. Following his father's death, Gillette and George Henry Warner were named executors of the estate, with Gillette, Warner, Elisabeth, and Edward sharing in the inheritance.

In 1881, while performing in Cincinnati, Gillette was hired as playwright, director, and actor for fifty dollars per week by brothers Gustave and Daniel Frohman. His first self-written and self-produced play, The Professor, debuted at the Madison Square Theatre and ran for 151 performances before touring as far west as St. Louis, Missouri. That same year he co-wrote Esmeralda with Frances Hodgson Burnett. Gillette recognized early in his career that working simultaneously as playwright, director, and actor offered him the greatest professional and financial advantage. He became one of the leading matinee idols of his era. Actress and drama critic Amy Leslie described him as one of Gibson's notables materialized. Observers noted that he rarely gesticulted, moved with deliberate slowness, and maintained absolute composure on stage, yet could produce moments of sudden, startling speed. Critics and scholars characterized his voice as dry, crisp, and metallic, and noted his capacity to hold an audience in silence through inner contemplation rather than overt emotional display. The New York Times remarked in 1937 that it would be conservative to call Gillette the most successful of all American actors.

Among his Broadway credits were the farce All the Comforts of Home, Digbey's Secretary, Electricity, and Clarice. His Civil War drama Held by the Enemy, which dates to 1886, is considered a significant step in the development of modern American theater. It moved away from the crude conventions of nineteenth-century melodrama and introduced realism into sets, costumes, props, and sound effects. The hospital scene in that play and the telegraph office scene in Secret Service are still regarded as among the most dramatically powerful scenes in American theatrical history. Held by the Enemy was also the first wholly American play with a wholly American subject to achieve both critical and commercial success on British stages, at a time when British audiences held American art in low regard. Gillette treated both sides of the Civil War with equal integrity in his writing, granting loyalty and honor to characters from both North and South.

During an 1886–87 production of Held by the Enemy, Gillette developed a new method of simulating the sound of a galloping horse on stage, finding the existing practice of striking coconut shell halves against marble both clumsy and unconvincing. He applied for Patent No. 389,294 on June 9, 1886, and it was issued on September 11 under the title Method of Producing Stage Effects. The patent described a method rather than a mechanical device and contained no illustrations across its two pages.

Gillette is most widely remembered for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, a role he performed on stage more than 1,300 times over thirty years. He also starred in a 1916 silent film based on his Holmes play and voiced the character twice on radio. His interpretation of Holmes contributed substantially to the modern image of the detective, including the popularization of the deerstalker cap, which had first appeared in Sidney Paget's illustrations for the Strand, and the curved pipe as defining symbols of the character. In November 1915, Gillette was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.