Newton Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921). He is one of only four novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along with William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. In the 1910s and 1920s he was considered the United States' greatest living author. Several of his stories were adapted to film.
Gertrude Lamson, known professionally as Nance O'Neil or Nancy O'Neil, was an American stage and film actress who performed in plays in various theaters around the world but worked predominantly in the United States between the 1890s and 1930s. At the height of her career, she was promoted on theater bills and in period trade publications and newspapers as the "American Bernhardt".
Louise Huff was an American actress of the silent film era.
Emily Stevens was a stage and screen actress in Broadway plays in the first three decades of the 20th century and later in silent films.
Genevieve Tobin was an American actress.
The Washington Square Players (WSP) was a theatre troupe and production company that existed from 1915 to 1918 in Manhattan, New York City. It started as a semi-amateur Little Theatre then matured into a Repertory theatre with its own touring company and drama school. It received national newspaper coverage and sparked like-minded companies across the country. After it ceased operating, three of its members founded the Theatre Guild.
First Lady is a 1935 play written by Katharine Dayton and George S. Kaufman. It is a three-act comedy, with three settings and a large cast. There are four scenes, which occur at monthly intervals starting with the December prior to a presidential election year. The story concerns a Washington, D.C. socialite who almost lets her rivalry with another social maven impede her husband's political future. The title is a play on the usual term accorded to a President's wife, suggesting it really belongs to the leading society hostess in the capitol.
Devereux Milburn was an American champion polo player in the early to mid twentieth century. He was one of a group of Americans known as the Big Four in international polo, winning the Westchester Cup six times. He is "remembered as possibly the best polo player this country ever produced." His given name has been alternatively spelled as "Devereaux" in some publications.
Common Clay is a 1914 play by Cleves Kinkead. Its structure varied by production: it started with a prologue, three acts and an epilogue. The prologue was later dropped, and still later, the epilogue was converted to a fourth act. It has three settings, and fourteen characters. The story concerns the dismissal of a young servant when she becomes pregnant by her employer's son, and her subsequent fight for justice. The action of the play spans ten years time. The play won the John Craig Prize, also referred to as the Harvard Prize, given annually to the best work produced in conjunction with George Pierce Baker's playwriting workshop at Harvard.
Alexandra Carlisle was an English actress and suffragist who settled in the United States. She was also known in the U.S. as Alexandra Carlisle Pfeiffer, adding the name of her third husband.
Maudi Darrell was an English actress on the London and New York stages, and a performer in vaudeville. She was one of the fashionable young women known as "Gaiety Girls".
Bettina Borrmann Wells was a Bavarian-born English suffragette who toured the United States as an organizer and lecturer.
The Country Cousin is a 1919 American silent drama film directed by Alan Crosland and starring Elaine Hammerstein, Genevieve Tobin and Lumsden Hare.
Virginia Norden, born Violet Alice Dalton, was an American actress on stage and in silent films.
José Ruben was a French-born actor whose career from 1910 on was in the United States. He first rose to prominence in 1916-1917 with the Washington Square Players, and for the next ten years was a highly regarded lead player. He acted in over twenty silent films and was a fixture on Broadway stages, as both performer and director, for over forty years. He also taught drama at Barnard College and was a stage director for the New York City Opera.
Madame Sand is a 1917 play written by Philip Moeller, who subtitled it "a biographical comedy". It consists of three acts, with a medium-sized cast and moderate pacing. Most of the play's characters are historical, figures from the Romantic literary and musical world of the 1830s. Each act has only one scene and one setting. The subject is an episodic treatment of three love affairs conducted by George Sand, with Alfred de Musset, Pietro Pagello, and Frédéric Chopin.
Merely Mary Ann is a 1903 play by British author Israel Zangwill. It is based on his own work of the same name, written in 1893 and later included in The Grey Wig (1903). It has four acts and three settings. The story explores the changing relationship between the younger son of a baronet, who has forsaken inheritance for composing, and an orphaned country girl, now working in a cheap London lodging house.
Seventeen is a 1917 play by writers Hugh Stanislaus Stange, Stannard Mears, and Stuart Walker, based on Booth Tarkington's 1916 novel. It is a four-act comedy with six scenes and two settings. The story concerns a seventeen-year-old boy in a small town who is smitten with a visiting beauty, enduring the pangs of a crush with the humiliation of not being accepted as adult by his family and friends.
Clarence is a 1919 play by Booth Tarkington. It is a four-act comedy with two settings and eleven characters. The story concerns an ailing recently discharged soldier who is given a handyman job by a financial tycoon because he has overheard family gossip in the tycoon's waiting room. Tarkington wrote the play with Alfred Lunt in mind, after having seen him perform in his earlier work, The Country Cousin.
Gregory Kelly was an American stage actor, who began performing as a child. He was a Broadway attraction, starring in such long-running productions as Seventeen and The Butter and Egg Man. His early death precluded him from appearing in more than two films. He is remembered today as the first husband of Ruth Gordon, who credited him with teaching her acting.
