Walter Hampden

Hampden, Walter (30 June 1879-11 June 1955), actor, was born Walter Hampden Dougherty in Brooklyn, New York, the son of John Hampden Dougherty, a lawyer, and Alice Hill. He was one of six children raised in a household where the arts were appreciated and practiced by all. At his father's suggestion, Hampden and Clayton Hamilton, dramatic critic and Hampden's lifelong friend, had, according to Hamilton, read "nearly every Elizabethan play extant before we had reached the usual age of going to college." The two friends also acted and produced together at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, where both went for high school and college; made frequent sojourns to the theaters of Manhattan; and toured to London and Paris for almost a year to absorb European culture.

After graduation in 1900 Hampden returned to Paris to study acting, dancing, singing, fencing, and cello. The following year Hampden went to England, where, with the influence of a family friend, he secured a position in the F. R. Benson acting company, which was noted as a training ground for many new actors. Hampden played larger and larger roles in Shakespearean plays, as well as other roles in the older repertory. He also met company member Mabel Moore, whom he married in 1905. They had a daughter and a son. Hampden left Benson in 1904 and until 1906 played a series of engagements in London and Glasgow under various managements in Shakespearean and modern dramas. By the time Hampden returned to his homeland, he was a classically trained and thoroughly experienced young actor.

He intended to return in the role of Manson in Charles Rann Kennedy's The Servant in the House. Kennedy wrote the play with Hampden in mind, and Hampden convinced American producer Henry Miller to back it. Miller was not immediately able to produce it, however. Instead he brought Hampden back to the United States in 1907 to play in support of Russian actress Alla Nazimova. Hampden first appeared in support of Nazimova as Comte Silvio in The Comtesse Coquet. He also played Solness to Nazimova's Hilda Wangel in the American premiere of Ibsen's The Master Builder. The Servant in the House opened in 1908 and played continually in New York and on the road for two years. Hampden played this intense "Christ-like" role for many years. As Manson, Hampden exhibited dignity, concentration, commanding presence, and the romantic style of acting in which he was trained. It was a larger-than-life, highly theatrical style that suited an older repertoire and was more popular, usually, on the road than in the big city.

Between 1910 and 1918, Hampden acted for various producers. While he was especially successful in the romantic roles available, he did not achieve great financial or artistic success in a repertory that did not really suit him. He spent many months at a time waiting for suitable work. An unusual opportunity came in the spring and summer of 1918, when Hampden played, in order, Elihu in The Book of Job, Marc Antony in Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iokonan in Oscar Wilde's Salomé, and Siddartha in The Light of Asia. These were all short-run independent productions, but all were well received by critics.

In the fall of 1918 Hampden began to present matinee productions of Hamlet at the Plymouth Theatre in New York. Unable to secure commercial backing and to afford the theater for nighttime performances, Hampden nonetheless played Hamlet at twice-weekly matinees for a year and a half. In the winter of 1919 Hampden acquired the support of some wealthy admirers, formed a corporation bearing his own name, and initiated a plan to take his production of Hamlet on tour. For four years his company crossed the nation, bringing an ever larger Shakespearean repertory to appreciative audiences. Despite his great artistic and popular success, Hampden's company was usually forced to play matinees in theaters that were reserved for more commercial ventures at night. His financial success, therefore, was continually compromised. For the fall of 1923 Hampden had determined to attempt a full season in repertory at the National Theatre in New York. At the urging of his friend Hamilton, he added Cyrano de Bergerac, a romantic drama by Edmund Rostand. Upon its opening, Colgate Baker declared in the New York Review that "In an age when romance was supposed to be dead, Walter Hampden has revived romance . . . so gloriously that he has made romanticists even out of dramatic critics, and I know of no greater tribute to pay to his acting" (10 Nov. 1923). The enormous success of Cyrano was unexpected by Hampden, who elected to present it exclusively during the year in New York to recover the finances of his company. The following fall Hampden took Cyrano on a successful tour.

Hampden returned to New York in January 1924 to play Othello and to make preparations for his own theater in New York. He arranged for a lease on what was then known as the Colonial Theatre and made it the home of his company until April 1930. During these years Cyrano proved to be a perennial money-maker, as was a lesser-known romantic drama titled Caponsacchi, which featured Hampden in another romantic role. Each year his efforts sustained a company of fifty or more performers, including his wife and a small coterie of company regulars. Hampden's friend, architect Paul Bragdon, had designed most of Hampden's productions since 1921. Together they embraced the aesthetics of the "New Stagecraft" movement, which tended to use minimal, suggestive scenic elements. Hampden's standard combination of backward-looking repertory and forward-looking stagecraft was never a huge financial success. With audiences declining in the year beginning the Great Depression, Hampden elected to cease his own productions.

After 1930 Hampden performed more frequently for other producers. Between 1932 and 1936 he reorganized his company to present Cyrano and other romantic fare on what was to become his last series of major national tours. Newsweek commented on his farewell performances of Cyrano: "Cyrano de Bergerac, a gossamer wisp of comedy and tragedy, has grown cobwebby with use. Thirteen years with Hampden has taken the fluff off it. The homely lover has become a blustering pantaloon instead of the swaggering poet-swordsman Rostand wrote of. . . . But audiences, sated with sentimental remembrances of Cyrano, enjoy a lengthy five acts, for all their creakiness" (9 May 1936, p. 44). In 1940 he performed in his first film as the Archbishop in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Hampden acted in some significant Broadway productions in the 1940s and helped to organize the American Repertory Theatre, established in 1946 as an American national theater. Long associated with the Players, the theatrical confraternity of which he was president from 1927 to 1954, Hampden performed Macbeth in their first television production in 1949. In 1953 he was Deputy-Governor Danforth in Arthur Miller's The Crucible in a production that suited his vigorous acting style and proved to be a fitting vehicle for his last Broadway performance. Ready to begin his fifteenth film, the seventh in two years after The Crucible, he died suddenly in Hollywood. He is remembered today as the last great starring actor to maintain a company of players in a repertory of Shakespearean and romantic drama.

Bibliography

A substantial collection pertaining to Hampden's career is in the Walter Hampden Memorial Library at the Players. Two works that should be consulted are E. Laurent, "Walter Hampden: Actor-Manager" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Illinois, 1969), and G. J. Parola, "Walter Hampden's Career as Actor-Manager" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana Univ., 1970). A more accessible overview is in William C. Young, Famous Actors and Actresses on the American Stage, vol. 1 (1975). An obituary is in the New York Times, 12 June 1955.

Maarten Reilingh

Back to the top

Citation:

Maarten Reilingh. "Hampden, Walter";

http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-00519.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 15:16:44 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)

Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.