Richard Mansfield

Mansfield, Richard (24 May 1854-30 Aug. 1907), actor, was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Maurice Mansfield, an English wine merchant who died when Richard was five, and Erminia Rudersdorff, an accomplished opera singer. Mansfield's mother's domineering tendencies led to a stormy relationship with her son. However, his difficult childhood and adolescence was partially offset by the cultural enrichment of travels through Europe, the kindness of his headmaster at Derby School, and the musical training provided by his mother.

After dividing his early years between England and Germany, in 1872 Mansfield accompanied his mother to Boston, where she established a residence. For a time he thought his future lay in commerce, and he clerked for family friend and prominent Boston merchant Eben D. Jordan. But he soon left to pursue a career in art, moving to London in 1877, both to study painting and to escape his mother.

Mansfield had been active in amateur theatricals in the Boston area, and, needing some means of support while in England, he found work on the music hall stage. Almost immediately he determined that the theater was his true calling. His vocal ability helped land him positions in two of D'Oyly Carte's Gilbert and Sullivan productions. For the next several years he traveled throughout England finding small roles to play, primarily in operettas.

Discouraged at his prospects in England, Mansfield returned to the United States in 1882 and performed on the musical stage in supporting roles. But his great break came on the dramatic stage. When J. H. Stoddart refused to play the lead role of Baron Chevrial in A Parisian Romance at New York's Union Square Theatre in January 1883, Mansfield was given the part. His portrayal of the profligate baron--especially his horrific death scene--became the sensation of the season. He bought the play and made it his starring vehicle for the next season on tour.

But this singular success did not assure stardom. Indeed, as most stars of that era discovered, the economics of the theater were unpredictable, and few players went through a career without financial reversals. In Mansfield's case this meant having a tour close prematurely on the road, having to temporarily surrender starring ambitions as part of a stock company, and later after acquiring a theater of his own having to soon lose it.

Still, Mansfield was fortunate in having his career coincide with the golden age of the American theater. Not only did scores of theatrical companies leave New York each year to tour the country, but the star system was firmly entrenched. Mansfield possessed a determination to be a star that was unusual even for his profession. "One thing is very distinct in my mind, and that is the impossibility and inadvisability of making an appearance here otherwise than as a star of the first magnitude," he wrote Augustin Daly in 1892, turning down the chance to appear with the company of the nation's leading theatrical manager. "I am exceedingly ambitious and I confess it." This ambition impelled Mansfield to produce a series of carefully chosen star vehicles beginning in the mid-1880s. His reemergence as a star came as a result of his portrayal of the title role in Archibald Gunter's Prince Karl in 1886 in Boston, which he took to New York and on tour in 1887. Thereafter, although enduring occasional financial setbacks and bouts of physical exhaustion, Mansfield belonged to the front rank of actor-managers.

During the next twenty-two years Mansfield put on twenty-seven plays and performed twenty-eight roles. He often alternated seasons of performing various plays in repertory with performing a single play for an entire season according to the theatrical custom of the day. He put great energy into seeking out challenging roles, not only performing the existing repertoire but also commissioning new plays. His most memorable roles displayed his dramatic stage effects. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (first performed in 1887 in Boston), perhaps his greatest crowd-pleaser, he effected a remarkable onstage transformation, portraying, as one critic put it, "a carnal monster of unqualified evil." Beau Brummell (1890), written by Clyde Fitch on Mansfield's commission, was sentimental fluff energized by the actor's moving portrayal of an English dandy's decline. His acclaimed Cyrano de Bergerac (1898) put financial concerns behind him; indeed, in the last decade of his life he was among the country's richest actors.

Although he kept Shylock in his repertoire through most of his career, Mansfield's most acclaimed Shakespearean role was Richard III. Oddly, considering his legendary ego, he never attempted Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, or Othello, perhaps sensing a lack of depth in his art for the most profound of Shakespeare's characters. Although normally identified with the vigorous roles of costume drama, Mansfield championed the new realism of European drama, bringing the first George Bernard Shaw play to an American theater with his Arms and the Man (1894) and later staging the first American production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1906).

Mansfield also campaigned vigorously--if inconstantly--against the Theatrical Syndicate's attempts at monopolistic control of bookings. For a time in 1896-1897 he gave impassioned curtain speeches castigating the evils of the syndicate. Along with other leading stars, he helped organize and was elected president of the Association for the Promotion and Protection of the Independent Stage in the United States, a group dedicated to regaining independent control of their bookings. But the revolt was short-lived, largely because Mansfield soon defected to the syndicate. Minnie Maddern Fiske, who nearly alone carried on the struggle, explained (but did not forgive) Mansfield's betrayal as the action of a man haunted by his past struggles for stardom and determined to let nothing threaten it.

A theatrical proverb of the late nineteenth century quipped "There are good actors, bad actors, and Richard Mansfield." Mansfield's larger-than-life stage presence, his highly mannered approach to acting, his enormous ego, and his storied outbursts of temper resulted in a critical reputation that varied widely. Without question, however, he dominated the American stage in the decade and a half before his death. Often compared with Henry Irving, who contemporaneously presided over the English stage, Mansfield felt an acute burden to elevate the tone of the American theater. This self-imposed duty encouraged a nearly paranoid perception that others were out to besmirch his career. Even the great Irving, who had aided Mansfield in his early career, came to be viewed as an enemy. Mansfield's reputation as a troubled genius inspired novelist Thomas Wolfe to base a fictional character on him in The Web and the Rock (1939).

If Mansfield's public persona was tempestuous, he found domestic tranquility in marriage to his leading lady, Beatrice Cameron (whose given name was Susan Hegeman), in 1892. She retired from the stage following the birth of their only child in 1898. Even with this newfound happiness, Mansfield kept up his demanding schedule. He had suffered several bouts of what was diagnosed as nervous exhaustion during his career. In the spring of 1907 he became ill and was forced to cancel his tour. He never recovered and died in New London, Connecticut.

Mansfield must be counted among the most talented performers to grace the American stage. He sang and danced beautifully, wrote music, plays, and poetry, and was, by the prevailing theater standards of the day, an intellectual. Below average in height but powerful and athletic, he commanded the stage. Although he was respected as a performer, he never won the heart of the public as had Joseph Jefferson or Edwin Booth. Perhaps this was because of difficult temperament or that his greatest roles embodied unattractive characters. Mansfield's death, as contemporary critic Walter Prichard Eaton noted, represented the end of an era in the American theater. He stood in the great romantic tradition--costume dramas grandly performed--yet acknowledging the more subdued realism then coming to define American acting.

Bibliography

Primary materials dealing with Mansfield's career can be found at the Library of Congress, Wilstach Collection; the Mansfield Scrap Book, Robinson Locke Collection; Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center; and the Mansfield clippings, Shaw Collection, Harvard University Library. Biographies by contemporaries are Paul Wilstach, Richard Mansfield, the Man and the Actor (1908), and William Winter, Life and Art of Richard Mansfield (2 vols., 1910). An obituary is in the New York Times, 31 Aug. 1907.

Benjamin McArthur

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American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

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