John Sayer Crawley | |
|---|---|
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| Born | John Sayer Crawley 8 March 1867 Upper Heyford, Northamptonshire, England |
| Died | 7 March 1948 (aged 80) New York City, United States |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1897–1948 |
John Sayer Crawley (8 March 1867 – 7 March 1948) was an English actor who, as Sayre Crawley, spent more than 40 years in American theatre playing roles on Broadway and at the Garden Theatre, among other venues.
Broadway theatre, commonly known as Broadway, refers to the theatrical performances presented in the 41 professional theatres, each with 500 or more seats located in the Theater District and Lincoln Center along Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Along with London's West End theatre, Broadway theatre is widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.
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Crawley served briefly as an officer in the British army before marrying Constance Thompson in 1892 in England. Both he and his wife sought acting roles, which resulted in their coming to the United States in 1902 with the Ben Greet Players. They starred in Ben Greet productions on both coasts, with Constance, under her married name of Constance Crawley, gaining wide attention in the West as a Shakespearean actress, while Crawley, first under his stage name of J. Sayre Crawley, and later as simply Sayre Crawley, found his best success in the East playing supporting actor and character actor roles in Broadway theatre. [1] As their careers took separate directions, Constance and Sayre separated, with Constance eventually moving to Los Angeles where she starred in several silent films, and Sayre continuing his acting career in New York City. [2]
Sir Philip Barling Greet, known professionally as Ben Greet, was a Shakespearean actor, director, and impresario.
Constance Crawley was an English actress best known for leading roles in Shakespeare tragedies. She gained notice on the American stage at the start of the 20th century, and later starred in and wrote several silent films.
A supporting actor is an actor who performs a role in a play or film below that of the leading actor(s), and above that of a bit part. In recognition of important nature of this work, the theater and film industries give separate awards to the best supporting actors and actresses.
Constance Crawley died in 1919, after which Sayre in 1922 married his second wife, Mary Ward Holton (1888–1966), who had performed on Broadway under the stage name of Mary Ward. [3] Although he continued in Broadway productions during the 1920s and 1930s, sometimes sharing the stage with Mary Ward, Sayre also did Shakespeare plays at the Garden Theatre, starring opposite Sybil Thorndike, Sydney Greenstreet and others. He was also a charter member with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre. [1] When he died on 7 March 1948 in New York, his obituary in The New York Times noted that he had "devoted his career to the New York stage since the turn of the century." [1]
Dame Agnes Sybil Thorndike was an English actress who toured internationally in Shakespearean productions, often appearing with her husband Lewis Casson. Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan specially for her, and she starred in it with great success. She was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1931, and Companion of Honour in 1970.
Sydney Hughes Greenstreet was a British actor. While he did not work in films until the age of 61, he had a run of significant motion pictures in a Hollywood career lasting for under a decade. He is best remembered for his Warner Bros. films with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, which include The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), and Passage to Marseille (1944). He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1925. He portrayed Nero Wolfe on radio from 1950 to 1951.
Eva Le Gallienne was a British-born American stage actress, producer, director, translator, and author. A Broadway star by age 21, Le Gallienne consciously ended her work on Broadway to devote herself to founding the Civic Repertory Theatre, in which she was both director, producer, and lead actress. Noted for her boldness and idealism, she became a pioneering figure in the American Repertory Movement, which enabled today's Off-Broadway. A versatile and eloquent actress herself, Le Gallienne also became a respected stage coach, director, producer and manager.
Sawyer had a long friendship with Sybil Thorndike, whom he had known since 1904 when both were members of the Ben Greet players on Greet's third North American Tour. [4] Thorndike refers to Crawley in her letters as "Master Rawdon", after the character Rawdon Crawley in Vanity Fair , and writes that she and others looked up to him as an older brother. [5] Apparently, he was often referred to as Rawdon Crawley among friends and family, both in jest, and in reference to his relationship with his first wife Constance Crawley.
Vanity Fair is an English novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial from 1847 to 1848, carrying the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, reflecting both its satirisation of early 19th-century British society and the many illustrations drawn by Thackeray to accompany the text. It was published as a single volume in 1848 with the subtitle A Novel without a Hero, reflecting Thackeray's interest in deconstructing his era's conventions regarding literary heroism. It is sometimes considered the "principal founder" of the Victorian domestic novel.
