Edwin Forrest

American actor

• Born: March 9, 1806
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: December 12, 1872
• Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Despite early obstacles in his career, Forrest became the first great American actor and the first to gain international acclaim.

Early Life

By temperament and circumstance, Edwin Forrest typified the rough, self-reliant individualism of the early nineteenth century pioneer. Though he was born into a comfortable middle-class environment, his choice of an acting career compelled him to leave the security of his home and to learn his craft in some of the wildest places amid some of the wildest men in the country.

Forrest’s father, a bank clerk, died when Forrest was thirteen, but he had already made plans for him to enter the safe, prestigious career of the ministry. The boy’s remarkable memory, gift for mimicry, and already distinctive voice, however, were better suited to the playhouse than the pulpit. At ten, he was a member of an amateur theatrical troupe, playing female roles. Tradition suggests that he was shrieked and laughed at on the stage, but this early failure only cemented his determination to act.

By his early teens, Forrest had held a number of jobs, including one as an apprentice printer. In the meantime, he was studying, reading, running his own juvenile acting company, and performing his first recitations in a neighbor’s old barn.

Forrest’s early commitment to the stage was abetted by the fortuitousness of geography, for Philadelphia, his native city, was a vital cultural hub, a theatrical center whose playhouses were among the oldest, liveliest, and most important in the country. It seems likely that the young actor enjoyed easy access to the many plays both produced and published in Philadelphia, as well as ample opportunity to study the styles and techniques of many actors in a variety of roles.

What is certain is that one of his youthful recitations so impressed several well-to-do citizens that they supported him in his studies for the next few years. Incredibly, Forrest made his professional debut at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia on November 27, 1820, playing Young Norval, a popular juvenile lead in John Home’s Douglas (1756). The part was perfect for him, requiring an amount of physical action that allowed him to show his grace and agility, and declamatory speech that showed to advantage his already impressive timbral voice. His success was unqualified; Forrest was only fourteen.

Life’s Work

Though he performed in several plays over the next few months, Forrest was convinced that he had to break the image of a juvenile actor and gain broader experience. To do this, he decided to travel west, across the Allegheny Mountains, where he would have more freedom to learn the profession, to experiment, to grow. Thus, in 1821, having been engaged by the theatrical company of Collins and Jones, Forrest embarked on a career as a strolling player for eight dollars a week.

By October, 1822, he was in Pittsburgh, once again playing Young Norval, developing the rugged physique and booming voice that were to become the crucial ingredients in his acting style. A few months later, he and his fellow strollers sailed a flatboat down the Ohio, stopping at Lexington, Kentucky, for several performances, and then traveling overland by covered wagon to Cincinnati, opening there in February, 1823.

The experience gained in these Western cities was decisive in shaping Forrest’s career. He learned the importance of holding an audience under exacting and restrictive conditions—theaters with poor lighting, a paucity of props and scenery, and a change of bill nightly. Each member of the small troupe was expected to play a variety of parts: the dramatic lead in one play, the clown in the other, the dancer in the encore or afterpiece.

In 1823, the troupe went bankrupt and Forrest was out of a job. Broke, he stayed on in Cincinnati, living with a theatrical family who admired his work. He spent the next few months in poverty, reading the works of William Shakespeare.

Finally, he accepted an offer to play in New Orleans, a key city in the southern and western circuit. By the winter of 1824, just short of his eighteenth birthday, Forrest opened there in a Restoration tragedy, but his leisure time in that city was spent carousing with James Bowie (who gave the young man one of his famous knives), with a roustabout steamboat captain, and with “domesticated” Indian chiefs and other frontier types. Such figures comported with his robust, hot-tempered, and impulsive spirit, complementing his basically unrefined education.

Throughout the spring of 1825, Forrest played a variety of roles in New Orleans, including Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (1604) and the title role in John Howard Payne’s Brutus: Or, The Fall of Tarquin(1818), one of his most popular portrayals. His persistence was finally rewarded. The following year, he obtained an engagement in Albany, New York, playing with Edmund Kean, the famous British actor. Shortly thereafter, he arrived in New York City, still poor but rich in experience and in a deepened understanding of his craft.

The turning point of his career was this New York debut. Opening at the Bowery Theater in November, 1826, playing Othello, he brought to the role all the experience his life on the road and in the Western playhouses had given him. He was a brilliant success. At the age of twenty, Edwin Forrest had conquered the American stage. His New York triumph was the beginning of a reputation that was to last for the next thirty years. In less than a year, he became the most famous and highest paid American actor of the period, advancing from a salary of twenty-eight dollars a week in 1826 to two hundred dollars per night in 1827-1828 to five hundred dollars per night during the late 1830’s.

At this point in his career, Forrest dedicated himself to the production of American plays. To encourage the development of a national drama and, shrewdly, to find just those plays in which he could use his tall, powerfully built body to advantage, Forrest sponsored a yearly competition to attract the best work. Among the many plays submitted, two in particular became important contributions to American dramatic literature of the nineteenth century. The Gladiator (1831), by Robert Montgomery Bird, and Metamora: Or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), by John A. Stone, were significant examples of the history play and the play on Indian themes, respectively. Both were well suited to Forrest’s gifts, containing sonorous, orotund poetry that displayed his powerful voice and quick, physical action that demonstrated his athletic prowess. Both supplied him with his most famous and popular roles to the end of his career.

Twice during the 1830’s he went to England, becoming the first great American actor appearing on the London stage. With nationalistic zeal, he opened his London engagement with The Gladiator, playing the role of Spartacus. In England, he met Catherine Sinclair, an actor, marrying her in 1837, at the peak of his fame. It was eventually an unhappy relationship. Often rash, jealous, and increasingly petulant, Forrest sued her for divorce in 1850. The trial was nasty and scandalous, becoming more notorious by Forrest’s frequent exercises in public self-justification. Though the episode did little damage to his career as an actor, it did reveal the weaker side of his character as a man.

Even before this public squabbling about his domestic life, however, Forrest’s role in one of the most infamous events in the history of the American theater gave further proof of a truculence that characterized much of his professional life. For years, Forrest was the chief American rival of William Macready, the noted British actor; the two were barely civil to each other. When Forrest was hissed on opening night in his second London tour of 1845, he bluntly attributed the heckling to a Macready faction, and when, in turn, Macready played in the United States and Forrest bitterly denounced him in the press, the feud took on a nationalistic, patriotic hue. On the night of May 7, 1848, supporters of Forrest stormed the Astor Place Opera House in New York City, where Macready was playing. Before the police broke up the riot, some thirty people had been killed. This so-called Astor Place Riot was the beginning of Forrest’s decline.

Forrest’s decline was assured, as well, by his body. Riddled with gout and arthritis, he was by the 1850’s in great pain; his imposing, muscular frame, which had been in large measure responsible for his success, now became an impediment to his active, robust acting style. His retirement was imminent. Trying to recapture his past glories, Forrest accepted an invitation to visit California. He played Cardinal Richelieu, a favorite role, but the audience saw only a gouty, ill-tempered old actor, and a month later, the play closed.

Because California had been a failure for him, Forrest returned to Philadelphia, now taking any engagement, anywhere, that would keep him going. At this point in his career, just before the Civil War, he was living on his reputation, but it was steadily eroding as younger actors such as Edwin Booth began to eclipse him.

By the late 1860’s, Forrest was in virtual, enforced retirement, living alone in his gloomy Philadelphia mansion. Few engagements were left him. His last performance was as Richelieu in Boston, during April, 1872. A few public readings closed his career, though he never stopped exercising, trying to keep his failing body in shape. On the morning of December 12, while pursuing rigorous exercise, Edwin Forrest sustained a massive stroke and was found dead later that day. In his will, he had made a provision for the establishment of a home for aged actors, but his estranged wife and an army of lawyers dismembered the will, and the provision died with Forrest.

Significance

Edwin Forrest’s rise to fame and fortune was a phenomenon characteristic of the period in American history when the country was just beginning to recognize its nationalistic aspirations and to realize its political identity. The country was ready to take a native cultural hero to its heart, especially one who could compete favorably with the British and with the rest of Europe. For the American theater, Forrest came along at the right time. He had a physical dynamism that projected an image of strength, agility, and forthrightness, those traits that Americans most cherished. Critical opinion of his ability has varied, ranging from William Winter’s famous remark about Forrest being “a vast animal bewildered by a grain of genius” to more recent studies that appraise Forrest’s contributions from the vantage point of history and his influence on generations of later actors.

Forrest was intensely patriotic, and his efforts to promote the American drama at a time when English drama and English actors held preference on the stage constituted a pioneering achievement from a man who had the strengths—and the moral weaknesses—of the pioneer spirit.

Bibliography

Barrett, Lawrence. Edwin Forrest. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1881. A fine early biography. Written less than a decade after Forrest’s death, the book is valuable as an accurate and brief account by a contemporary fellow actor. The style is often laden with Victorian circumlocutions and overripe delicacies, but the assessment of Forrest that emerges is largely sympathetic and well balanced.

Boardman, Gerald. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869-1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. A year-by-year description of plays produced primarily in first-class New York theaters. An index lists Edwin Forrest and other actors that have six or more pages of information. Provides an idea of the type of theater that was produced in Forrest’s day.

Csida, Joseph, and June Bundy. American Entertainment: A Unique History of Popular Show Business. New York: Billboard Books, 1978. A largely pictorial panorama of American theatrical history, with reproductions of playbills, posters, and advertisements, as well as portraits of famous actors. The book contains a lively assessment of Forrest’s character and acting ability by fellow actor John W. Blaisdell. Also treats the theatrical milieu of the Forrest era.

Hughes, Glenn Arthur. A History of the American Theatre: 1700-1950. New York: Samuel French, 1951. Discusses, sometimes too sketchily, the theatrical times, customs, and personalities during Forrest’s rise. A good overview rather than a specific treatment.

Moses, Montrose J., and John Mason Brown, eds. The American Theatre as Seen by Its Critics: 1752-1934. New York: W. W. Norton, 1934. Contains William Winter’s famous critique of what he called Forrest’s “ranting” style. Winter dismissed Forrest as an actor who lacked intellectual depth but possessed a “puissant animal splendour.” An important anti-Forrest assessment.

Schanke, Robert A., and Kim Marra, eds. Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Information about Edwin Forrest is included in this collection of critical and biographical essays about actors with unconventional sexual inclinations, on- and offstage.

Wilson, C. B. A History of American Acting. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. Provides an incisive account of Forrest’s acting style, emphasizing the influence of Edmund Kean; rich in detail and quite readable. Most of the more important critics are cited.