Gertrude Lawrence

At 54 years old, Gertrude Lawrence has this physical status:

Gertrude Lawrence, born in 1898 and died on September 6, 1952, was an English actor, singer, dancer, and musical comedy performer known for her stage appearances in London and New York's Broadway.

Early life

Lawrence was born in Newington, London, Gertrude Alice Dagmar Klasen, Alexandra Dagmar Lawrence-Klasen, Gertrude Alexandra Dagmar Klasen, or some other variant (sources differ). Arthur Lawrence, her father, was a basso profundo who appeared under the name Arthur Lawrence. Alice, Gertrude's mother, had to leave him soon after he was born.

In 1904, her stepfather brought the family to Bognor, Sussex, for the August bank holiday. They attended a concert where audience members were invited to entertain, although there. Young Gertrude performed a song and was given a gold sovereign for her efforts at her mother's request. It was her first public appearance.

Alice accepted a job in the chorus of the Christmas pantomime at Brixton Theatre in 1908 to supplement the family's meagre income. To round out the troupe, we needed a child who could sing and dance, and Alice volunteered her daughter. Alice discovered Italia Conti, who taught dance, elocution, and the basic acting techniques while working in the company. Gertrude auditioned for Conti, who felt that the child was intelligent enough to warrant free lessons.

Lawrence appeared in Where the Rainbow Ends, Italia Conti's production; (Conti's training of the cast led her to the formation of the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in 1911). Lawrence performed in Max Reinhardt's The Miracle, directed by Basil Dean, in London and Fifinella for the Liverpool Repertory Theatre, as a result of Conti's training. At some point during this period, the child decided to adopt her father's professional surname as her own. In his next film, Gerhart Hauptmann's Hannele, where she first met Nol Coward. Their meeting marked the beginning of a close and often flirty friendship, as well as the most significant professional relationship in both their lives.

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Early stage career

Lawrence reunited with her father, who was living with a chorus child, after Hannele. They decided to let her tour with them in two separate revues after Arthur revealed he had signed a year-long deal with a variety show in South Africa, leaving the two young women to fend for themselves. Lawrence, who has turned 16 years old, preferred to live at the Theatrical Girls' Club in Soho rather than returning to her mother and stepfather.

She worked in various touring companies until 1916, when embpresario André Charlot hired her to understudie Beatrice Lillie and appear in the chorus of his new London production. As it came to an end, she absorbed Lillie's role on tour and then returned to London to understudy the actress in another Charlot production, where she met dance director Francis Gordon-Howley. Despite being twenty years older, the two children were married and then had a daughter, Pamela, who was Lawrence's only child. Lawrence and Pamela were taken by Lawrence and her mother, Clapham, to her mother's house. The couple were married for a few years but did not marry until ten years later.

She contracted lumbago during Lawrence's pregnancy or shortly after she gave birth in 1918. Charlot took two weeks to recover. Lawrence was invited to return to work by her doctor at an opening night party at Ivor Novello's invitation two days before she was allowed to return to work by her doctor. Charlot fired her straight away. According to some accounts, she was allegedly unable to find work when the apparent reason for her dismissal became known among other West End theatre designers. (The veracity of this information is put into doubt by a theater program for the opening of Charlot's revue Buzz Buzz Buzz, which clearly shows Lawrence was in the cast at the time, but there is no evidence that she has left the cast during its 613-performance run, which ended on March 20, 1920.)

Lawrence accepted a job singing at Murray's, a famous London nightclub, where she stayed for the better part of the next two years. Captain Philip Astley, a member of the Household Cavalry, was among those performing there. He became her mentor, escort, and eventually lover, and she taught her how to dress and act in high society.

Lawrence left Murray's and began to reintegrate into the proper theater while touring in a music hall performance as the partner of popular singer Walter Williams at the end of 1920. Charlot's founder, Beatrice Lillie, was forced to be replaced by Beatrice Lillie in his latest film, A to Z, opposite Jack Buchanan in October 1921. In it, the two performed "Limehouse Blues," which went on to become one of Lawrence's most popular songs.

Nol Coward's first musical revue, London Calling!, was produced in 1923, specifically for Lawrence. Charlot decided to produce it but hired more experienced writers and composers to assist with the book and score. "Parisian Pierrot," one of Coward's best-known songs, would be closely related to Lawrence throughout her career.

André Charlot's London Revue of 1924, which he brought to Broadway with Lawrence, Lillie, Jack Buchanan, and Constance Carpenter, after the show's success. The festival was so popular that it had to relocate to a larger Broadway theater to cater to the tickets demand, extending its run. The show toured the United States and Canada after closing, but Lawrence was forced to leave the cast when she suffered double pneumonia and pleurisy, and was forced to spend fourteen weeks in a Toronto hospital recuperating.

In late 1925, Charlot's Revue of 1926, starring Lawrence, Lillie, and Jack Buchanan, opened on Broadway. Alexander Woollcott called Lawrence "the personification of style and sophistication" and "the ideal actress" in his analysis, naming her "the personification of style and sophistication" and "the ideal actor." Following the Broadway run, it toured like its predecessor. Lawrence's last project with Charlot was a failure. When she opened in Oh, Kay! with music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and a book by Guy Bolton and P.G., she became the first British artist to appear in an American musical on Broadway in 1926. Wodehouse. The musical opened in London's West End, where it appeared for 213 performances following a string of 256 performances.

Philip Astley proposed marriage to Lawrence Astley in 1927, although she was aware Astley would prefer her to leave the stage and settle in rural England. The two stayed close until actor Madeleine Carroll married them in 1931. Lawrence Gordon-Howley's wife became engaged and remained so for two years, with each free to enjoy a social life distinct from the other.

Lawrence returned to Broadway in 1928 as her sister, Clifton Webb, in Treasure Girl, a Gershwin production that was certain to be a big hit. Pamela, a personal maid and two cars, and her daughter Pamela, who was arriving in New York, settled into a two-car garage, which was anticipated a long time. Her instincts were incorrect; audiences were reluctant to accept her as an avaricious woman who double-crosses her lover, and it was only for 68 performances. She appeared in Candle Light, an Austrian play that Wodehouse adapted, in 1929, and then on Broadway in 1931. Johnny Green wrote his most famous song, "Body and Soul," for Gertrude Lawrence in 1930.

Lawrence began preparing for her Broadway debuts while working in Manhattan. Liebling began training Beverly Sills, a seven-year-old Brooklyn resident who as an adult became a well-known opera singer. Lawrence went back to study with Liebling for many years.

Later stage career

Lawrence and Coward appeared in Tonight at 8.30, the second in a series of ten one-act plays he had written specifically for the two actors. Susan and God appeared in the Rachel Crothers drama in 1937, and Samson Raphaelson's comedy Skylark appeared in 1939. Lawrence felt the play needed to be staged before opening on Broadway, so a run at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, was scheduled. Richard Aldrich, a Broadway actor, and the actor and the actress became involved in a passionate relationship. On her birthday in 1940, the two met and married until her death in 1952. They lived in Dennis and Turtle Bay, Manhattan.

Pamela S. Cahan, Lawrence's daughter, married William G. Cahan, a New York doctor. The wedding was held at the Dennis, Massachusetts home of Lawrence and Aldrich. Lawrence was friendly with her son-in-law but lost touch with him after his 1950 separation from Pamela, according to Cahan's memoir, which was published in 1992. Lawrence had no grandchildren in her lifetime.

In 1941, Lawrence returned to the musical stage in Lady in the Shadow. It had been intended as a tribute to Katharine Cornell by Moss Hart, Kurt Weill, and Ira Gershwin, but by the time the first act was complete, it was clear that it was much more musical than a performer. Hart met Lawrence at a rehearsal for a film that aims to raise funds for British War Relief, and he suggested Liza Elliott, a magazine editor undergoing psychoanalysis to help her clarify why both her professional and personal lives are plagued with uncertainty.

The performance was very experimental and stretched the actor's abilities for singing, dancing, and acting. In his review in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called her "the greatest feminine performer in the American theatre," and Richard Watts of the New York Herald Tribune called her "the greatest feminine performer in the American theatre," and Richard Watts of the New York Herald Tribune called her "the greatest feminine performer in the American theatre," and Brooks Atkinson called her "a goddess." She stayed with the show through its Broadway run and its subsequent national tour over the next three years.

Ira Gershwin of Lady in the Dark spoke to American songwriting scholar Sheila Davis about Lawrence's contribution to honing the lyrics of his song "My Ship" in Lady in the Dark. "Gertrude Lawrence suddenly stopped singing midline and shouted out to Gershwin, who was assisting with the orchestra," Davis said, "why not five or six?" explains the woman in the Dark. Of course, the line read, 'I could wait for years.' "The lyricist used the to clarify the aural confusion."

Lawrence starred in 1945 as Henry Higgins opposite Raymond Massey in a Pygmalion revival by George Bernard Shaw, who initially dismissed the possibility of Lawrence playing the role. Following her Broadway debut, she toured the United States (including a stint in Washington, D.C.) and Canada before May 1947.

Film career

Lawrence appeared in only nine films between 1929 and 1950. She made her screen debut in 1929 in The Battle of Paris, which featured two Cole Porter songs. The film was shot within seconds after the Broadway production of Treasure Girl unexpectedly closed, and she accepted the challenge because she had no intention of performing on stage in the immediate future. Arthur Treacher and Charles Ruggles co-starred in the film, which was shot in The Astoria Studio complex in Astoria, Queens, was shot in Lawrence was portrayed as Georgie, an artist who lived in Paris before World War I. She becomes a cabaret singer and falls in love with an American soldier. Lawrence's songs and costumes were more significant than the plot, which was so bad that director Robert Florey threatened to resign midway through filming. It was not a success, as one commentator put it simply as a "floperetta."

She appeared in three films in 1932: Aren't We All? Harry Lachman's directed Lady Camber's Ladies, directed by Benn W. Levy and co-starring Gerald du Maurier; and No Funny Business with Laurence Olivier. She appeared in Mimi in 1935, who was based on La Vie de Bohème. She co-starred with Rex Harrison in Men are Not Gods in the following year and appeared opposite Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester in Rembrandt and co-starred with Rex Harrison in Men Are Not Gods, both directed by Alexander Korda.

Amanda Wingfield, the overbearing mother in The Glass Menagerie (1950), was Lawrence's most well-known American film role, which both Bette Davis and Tallulah Bankhead had hoped for. The job demanded her to wear padding and imitate a Southern American accent, so colleagues and commentators questioned her decision not to accept it. After the film's release, Tennessee Williams, who had written the script, called Lawrence "a dismal mistake" and characterized it as the "worst interpretation of his work he had seen so far. Amanda "a farcically exaggerated shrew with the zeal of a burlesque comedienne" and "a convincing recreation of a tumultuous Mama in domestic comedy," Bosley Crowther of The New York Times described her. Richard Griffith was generous in his praise for her appearance in Saturday Review, saying, "Not since Garbo has there been anything like the naked eloquence of her face, with its stunning play of thought and emotion."

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