Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes, born in Washington, D.C., in 1900, was a renowned American actress celebrated for her extensive contributions to theater, film, and television. Often referred to as the "First Lady of the American Theater," Hayes's career spanned over six decades, during which she won two Academy Awards and numerous accolades for her performances. Her early exposure to drama came from her mother, an aspiring actress, which ignited Hayes's passion for the stage. She made her Broadway debut as a child and quickly rose to prominence with standout roles in plays like "What Every Woman Knows" and "Coquette," the latter of which established her as a leading lady on Broadway.
Hayes transitioned seamlessly into film, winning her first Oscar for her role in "The Sin of Madelon Claudet" in 1931. Her notable performances continued with roles opposite film legends such as Ronald Coleman and Clark Gable. Throughout her personal and professional life, Hayes faced significant challenges, including the tragic loss of her daughter, which deeply affected her. Nevertheless, she persisted in her craft, returning to the stage and television later in her career, earning another Academy Award for her supporting role in "Airport." Hayes’s legacy endures, marked by her artistic achievements and her contributions to civil rights and the arts, making her a beloved figure in American cultural history. She passed away at the age of ninety-two in 1993.
Helen Hayes
Actress
- Born: October 10, 1900
- Birthplace: Washington, D.C.
- Died: March 17, 1993
- Place of death: Nyack, New York
American actor
In more than sixty years on stage and screen, Hayes epitomized what many came to call her: the first lady of the American theater. The New York Times named her one of the three great women of theater in the United States, she won two Academy Awards during her long career, and she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Areas of achievement Theater and entertainment, film, television, radio
Early Life
Born Helen Hayes Brown in Washington, D.C., Hayes (hayz) was the granddaughter of Patrick and Ann Hayes, who emigrated from Ireland to the United States during the potato famine. Her great aunt, Catherine Hayes, was a famous Irish singer (the “Swan of Erin”) who entertained large crowds in London as well as “forty-niners” in the United States. Helen Hayes’s mother, Catherine “Essie” Hayes, an aspiring but unsuccessful actress, directed her early career. Hayes’s father, Francis Arnum Brown, was a wholesale meat salesman.
Like many “stage mothers,” Catherine Hayes brought her child into the world of drama. Essie took Hayes to her first theater experience: Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow. Nicknamed the White Mouse by her family, Hayes immediately acquired a strong affection for the theater. Shortly thereafter, she gave her first performance, as Peaseblossom, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Hayes’s early education enhanced her theatrical ambition. First at Holy Cross Academy, then later at Sacred Heart Convent, Hayes came under the influence of Roman Catholic nuns who encouraged her interests in acting and music. She also attended Minnie Hawke’s School of Dance, which sponsored several musicals in which the young girl could sing and dance. Since Hayes’s singing was better than her dancing, she concentrated on the latter, resulting in her first professional performance in The Prince Chap.
At the age of eight, Hayes accompanied her mother to a New York audition for Broadway’s Lew Fields. Fields, impressed with Hayes’s singing, signed her for a leading role in Victor Herbert’s 1909 presentation Old Dutch. This began a series of stage performances in Fields’s presentations.
Despite Hayes’s youthful successes, her childhood was not without its heartaches. Her mother began to drink excessively, and Hayes, like many children of alcoholics, believed that somehow it was her fault. Caring for a drunken mother was not easy for the young girl and her father. Eventually, it became too much for Francis Brown. Although the Browns never divorced, they separated for life.
Hayes’s stage career also produced its share of difficulties. In 1918, following her exceptional performance in Dear Brutus, she received her first starring role on Broadway as a flapper in Bab (1920). The latter was a growing experience. By her own admission, she suffered from poor posture and an inability to relax on stage. Her shrill voice bothered critics, including one who dismissed her performance as an unsuccessful effort to get by on her cuteness.
Although these criticisms bruised Hayes’s youthful ego, she resolved to develop sufficient discipline to correct all of her major weaknesses, and she did. Improving her posture and relaxing the tenseness (by curling her toes), Hayes entered the world of light comedy, in which she quickly excelled. In 1926, her performance in What Every Woman Knows not only restored Hayes to the critics’ good graces but also made the play one of her signature presentations, and she repeated it in 1938 and 1954.
Hayes’s subtlety and power in What Every Woman Knows so impressed producer Jed Harris that he cast her for the leading role in Coquette (1927), in which she played an aristocratic southern belle who commits suicide after becoming pregnant by a poverty-stricken young man. Although veteran Broadway observers doubted the wisdom of casting a light comedienne in such a dramatic role, the critics raved and the audience gave her sixteen curtain calls.
Coquette established Hayes’s Broadway career. The distinguished British writer Noël Coward, who was not known for giving out compliments, summarized Hayes’s performance as “astonishingly perfect. . . . She ripped our emotions to shreds.” At the age of twenty-seven, Hayes was now a full-blown star.
Hayes’s personal life also reached fruition during these formative stages. In 1925, while preparing for Caesar and Cleopatra, she met a Chicago newspaper reporter and aspiring playwright named Charles MacArthur. It was love at first sight. Over the protests registered by Hayes’s mother and both of MacArthur’s parents, and despite the fact that he was married (although separated) at the time, the mutual attraction was overwhelming. Their marriage followed shortly after his successful collaboration with Ben Hecht in The Front Page (1928). With professional and personal foundations established, Hayes embarked on one of the most remarkable careers in American theater.
Life’s Work
Following her wedding and the birth of her daughter Mary in February, 1930, Hayes entered the most productive phase of her career. Although Mr. Gilhooley (1930) produced little praise, and Petticoat Influence (1930) and The Good Fairy (1931) fared only slightly better, Hayes entered Hollywood’s cinematic world with a flourish, attaining instantaneous national stardom in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931), which won for her an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Madelon Claudet’s amazing success was made even more remarkable by the fact it was not only her first Hollywood film but also her first talking picture. Editing problems (preview audiences booed during private screenings) nearly prevented the film’s release. Producer Irving Thalberg saw brilliant potential and saved the film by making only slight alterations. Hayes’s performance as Madelon, a French mother forced into prostitution through her efforts to save her illegitimate son, left audiences weeping all over America.
Since winning an Oscar established Hayes’s cinematic reputation, her film career immediately scaled new heights. First, she played opposite Ronald Coleman in Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith (1931); next came a costarring appearance with an emerging young actor named Gary Cooper in another American classic, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1932). Her next film, which paired Hayes with the “King of Hollywood,” Clark Gable, was The White Sister (1933). Still not finished, Hollywood exploited Hayes by featuring her in four more films in less than two years.
When Hayes returned to New York in 1933 to play Mary of Scotland, her reputation as a film celebrity preceded her. Hayes’s box-office appeal was so great that she played to packed houses for several months. Although the actress stood only five feet tall, she somehow managed to capture the six-foot queen’s essential spirit and presence.
The techniques that Hayes employed in Mary of Scotland served as a successful basis for her tour de force performance of Victoria Regina in 1935. It was this portrayal of the great English monarch that won for her the medal awarded by the Drama League of New York for the best stage achievement by an actress that year. Victoria Regina probably was Hayes’s most famous role in her long career.
Audiences and critics alike applauded Hayes’s contribution to American culture. The play enjoyed a run of 969 performances in front of America’s toughest crowds. The acting challenge was formidable, requiring Hayes to age more than fifty years throughout the evening complete with sagging face and swelling cheeks. Reflecting first youth, then maturity, and finally old age required talent rarely seen even on the New York stage. So successful was her depiction of the aging queen that some members of the audience did not even recognize her.
The play went on the road throughout the United States. For millions of Americans, Hayes was Queen Victoria. In Washington, D.C., Eleanor Roosevelt saw the play three times and “could not stop clapping.” Invited to the White House by the first lady, Hayes met President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who inquired, “And how is your majesty?” Victoria Regina left an indelible imprint on the history of acting in America.
Hayes never again matched the heights she achieved in Victoria Regina, although memorable stage and screen performances followed during her long career. In 1938, Hayes and MacArthur adopted a seven-month-old son, James MacArthur, who later spent twelve years playing detective Danny “Danno” Williams on the television show Hawaii Five-O. In the late 1930’s, Hayes and her husband strongly supported America’s entry into World War II, which was already raging in Europe. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Charles MacArthur volunteered his services to the military, while Hayes sold war bonds.
Hayes’s stage and screen career flattened out during the war years until she succeeded in 1943 with Harriet, a historical play based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Hayes’s great concern with civil rights for African Americans undoubtedly accounted for the emotional commitment that she made to this work. Critics also praised her work in Happy Birthday (1946).
Tragedy struck Hayes in 1949, when polio claimed the life of her nineteen-year-old daughter, Mary MacArthur, a budding actress who had just appeared with her mother in Good Housekeeping. Hayes later wrote that “nothing is more difficult to accept than the death of a child.”
More adversity followed Mary’s death. First, Hayes’s alcoholic mother, Catherine Hayes Brown, died shortly after her granddaughter’s death. Then, MacArthur, also an alcoholic, began drinking incessantly because he was unable to cope with the loss of his daughter. According to Hayes, her husband “set about killing himself. It took seven years, and it was harrowing to watch.” MacArthur died in 1956.
Coping with the loss of three of the people she loved most dearly became Hayes’s greatest challenge. After first believing that she had caused her husband’s death, Hayes came to understand that only MacArthur could have sought help for himself. When she accepted that fact, she was able to go on with her future. With grim determination, Hayes turned to her son and her profession for solace. She also returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which had excommunicated her following her marriage to the divorced MacArthur. Together, her faith, her son, and her profession sustained her throughout her remaining years.
Although Hayes had not undertaken a significant film since Vanessa, Her Love Story in 1935, friends urged her to make Anastasia (1956) with Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner. The result might have pleased other actresses, but for Hayes it represented only an average performance.
Hayes also returned to Broadway with renewed vigor. Four plays in four years followed: The Skin of Our Teeth (1955), The Glass Menagerie (1956), Time Remembered (1957), and A Touch of the Poet (1958). Hayes also took to television in her later years. Television viewers enjoyed her performances in The Snoop Sisters (1972), Victory at Entebbe (1976), Murder Is Easy (1982), A Caribbean Mystery (1983), and Murder with Mirrors (1985).
Hayes appeared in several films near the end of her career, and in 1971 Hollywood gave her a second Academy Award (Best Supporting Actress) for her role in Airport (1970). She retired from the stage following her performance in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1972). Hayes died of heart failure at the age of ninety-two on March 17, 1993.
Significance
Hayes was one of the great stars within the American theatrical firmament. Although her talents came to her naturally, it was her great determination, durability, and many years of toiling under the lights that made her one of America’s consummate troupers. Work, “plain hard steady work,” was the most satisfying thing in her life.
No task was too great or small for this diminutive woman who threw herself into all areas of theatrical performance. On Broadway and in Hollywood, on radio and television, her willingness to work hard without complaining complemented the great natural talent she displayed in rising to the top of her profession.
Hayes suffered through her share of disappointments, but when tragedy seemed to block her way, she never gave up hope or faith. Life’s setbacks never deterred her from her ultimate goals. Reared by unhappy parents, rejected by the church of her childhood, married to an increasingly alcoholic husband whom she loved, staggered by the tragic death of her only biological child, Hayes more than persevered in the face of sometimes overwhelming adversity she triumphed.
Her achievements were many, both in and out of the acting profession. Two Academy Awards and the New York Drama League Medal symbolized the contributions of this actor who was honored as the first lady of the American theater. In August, 1988, President Ronald Reagan presented her with the National Medal of Arts award for artistic excellence. There was more: Hayes was president of the American Theater Wing and the American National Theater and Academy, chair of the March of Dimes, and the winner of the Catholic Interracial Council of New York’s award for her civil rights activities.
Although Hayes was more than America’s leading theatrical actress, acting remained her greatest achievement. The New York Times called her one of the three great women of the American theater. When she died, the lights of Broadway dimmed in honor of the woman who bestrode the theatrical world like a colossus.
Bibliography
Eames, John Douglas. The MGM Story. Rev. ed. New York: Crown, 1979. Hayes did a number of films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, so this collection of articles and photographs makes a solid contribution toward an understanding of her film career.
Ellrod, J. G. The Stars of Hollywood Remembered: Career Biographies of Eighty-Two Actors and Actresses of the Golden Era, 1920’s-1950’s. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997. This collection of biographical essays on the actors of Hollywood’s early years includes a biography of Hayes.
Hayes, Helen. On Reflection. New York: M. Evans, 1968. Hayes’s autobiographical contributions are always valuable primary sources, and this is no exception. Hayes is refreshingly self-analytical and self-critical. Her honest analyses, however anecdotal and impressionistic, usually are very helpful in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of her career and life.
Hayes, Helen, with Lewis Funke. A Gift of Joy. New York: M. Evans, 1965. Written nine years after her husband’s death, this deeply penetrating memoir is an excellent philosophical, psychological, and spiritual exposition of Hayes’s professional and personal life. Includes Hayes’s favorite poetry and some speeches and quotations that inspired her.
Hayes, Helen, with Katherine Hatch. My Life in Three Acts. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Hayes’s final work is more revealing than previous efforts, particularly in areas deemed controversial or painful. This autobiography is especially helpful in understanding the pitfalls of being the child of an alcoholic and being married to an alcoholic.
Houghton, Norris. Advance from Broadway. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1941. Houghton traveled 19,000 miles over his career to observe America’s theatrical patterns. In the process, he discovered the incredible impact that Hayes exerted on the general public in the “sticks.”
Robbins, Jhan. Front Page Marriage. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982. A fine study of the relationship between Hayes and her husband, Charles MacArthur.
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