William Hodge

William Thomas Hodge (November 1, 1874 – January 30, 1932) was an American actor, playwright, and theatrical producer born in Albion, New York, the third of four children of Irish immigrants Thomas Hodge and Mary Anderson. His father worked first as a teamster and later as a stone mason. Hodge attended public schools in Albion before entering the theater as a property man with the same theatrical company that employed his older brother Joseph.

Hodge made his Broadway debut in spring 1899, appearing as a Brazilian heavy in the musical comedy A Reign of Error. Though he was a minor player earning thirty-five dollars a week, playwright James A. Herne took notice and sought him for Sag Harbor. Because Hodge was under contract to Klaw and Erlanger, Herne's producer-manager George C. Tyler negotiated with Abe Erlanger to loan him out. The gamble proved well-founded: a reviewer for The New York Times judged Hodge's performance in Sag Harbor the best in the production. After touring in that play and appearing in two short-lived Broadway productions, Tyler cast him again in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch in 1903. Hodge played Stubbins, a mail-order groom who becomes an unlikely romantic prospect for the spinster Miss Hazy, a role popular with audiences that kept him occupied on Broadway and on tour through 1905. He subsequently appeared in a musical and then the operetta Dream City, which ran through 1907.

His career reached a turning point with The Man from Home, written by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson during a European trip in 1907. Wilson told producer Tyler that the central character had been conceived with Hodge in mind, and Hodge accepted the starring role. The production set a dramatic record of 316 performances during its initial Chicago run in 1907–1908, then opened on Broadway in August 1908 and ran through November 1909 for nearly 500 performances before embarking on a national tour that continued for four seasons. Hodge's consistent drawing power on the road gave rise to the Broadway phrase "The William Hodge public," a term indicating that his performances would attract audiences anywhere in the country regardless of their New York reception. While still performing in The Man from Home and residing at The Lambs Club, Hodge married actress Helen Perley Cogswell, who performed on Broadway under the name Helen Hale from 1901 through 1909, in June 1909.

From 1913 onward, Hodge wrote his own plays, initially under the pen name Lawrence Whitman. His first effort under that pseudonym, The Road to Happiness, was signed with Lee Shubert in January 1913 and performed successfully on the road before reaching Broadway in 1915, where it lasted only a month. Shubert subsequently purchased two more Lawrence Whitman plays: Fixing Sister in 1916, which The New York Times openly identified as Hodge's own work, and A Cure for Curables in 1918, co-written primarily with Earl Derr Biggers, a comedy set in a sanitarium in which Hodge played a physician tasked with curing ten patients in ten days. By 1919, Hodge had abandoned the alias entirely, selling The Guest of Honor to Shubert under his own name.

Beware of Dogs, which opened in 1921, cast Hodge as a Greenwich, Connecticut, kennel owner who endures the demands of his charges and their owners before finally confronting them all, a more satirical role than he typically inhabited. The production reached its hundredth performance on December 14, 1921, and closed three nights later. His most commercially durable Broadway work as a playwright was For All of Us, which premiered in October 1923. Hodge played an Irish laborer imprisoned at Sing Sing whose life is transformed by a bible, and the production moved among several Shubert-owned venues before reaching its two-hundredth performance in early April 1924, closing two weeks afterward.

The Judge's Husband marked the end of Shubert's sponsorship of Hodge's work. A three-act farce in which a rural Connecticut judge, played by Gladys Hanson, must preside over her own divorce from her attorney husband played by Hodge, the play was written, staged, and starred in by Hodge himself. Critics suggested it would survive on Broadway only as long as audiences wished to see Hodge the performer rather than Hodge the playwright, yet demand for him proved sufficient to carry the production through January 1, 1927, a run of more than three months. Hodge then produced his own subsequent work, Straight Through the Door in 1928, a mystery comedy in which he played an actor suspected of murder who ultimately exposes the true culprit, with direction handled by Maurice Barrett. Inspector Kennedy in 1929 was the only play after 1913 in which Hodge performed without having written it himself, the work of Milton Herbert Gropper and Edna Sherry. It closed after a month, and Hodge quickly mounted The Old Rascal at the same venue, again directed by Barrett. In it, Hodge played a wealthy elderly California judge who outmaneuvers swindlers attempting a confidence scheme against him. The production closed on Broadway after two months and proved to be his final stage appearance.

Hodge died of lobar pneumonia on January 30, 1932, at his home in the Round Hill community of Greenwich, Connecticut, having been ill for three days before his death. He was survived by his wife Helen Cogswell Hodge, daughters Genevieve Hodge Law and Martha Hodge, and son William Hodge Jr. A service was held at his home the following day, after which his body was cremated.