Sewell Stokes

[From the original Introduction by W. Somerset Maugham; reprinted in A Traveller in Romance, ed. John Whitehead (JW), Clarkson N. Potter, 1984, pp. 34-6:]

[...]

I did not see Gladys Cooper again till she appeared in Edward Knoblock’s play, My Lady’s Dress [1920 – Ed.]; but she must by then have acquired something of a reputation since she played the lead. The only recollection I have of it is that she wore a number of pretty frocks and looked even more beautiful than I remembered her. Her acting was only just adequate. It had neither ease nor variety. The last time I saw her was in Noël Coward’s Relative Values [1951-53 – Ed.]. The lovely golden hair was now white, but her figure had retained its youthful slimness and her beauty was undimmed. Her performance was remarkable. It seemed to me that she had never acted better, with greater command of her resources or with greater authority. She had the ease, the variety that she had lacked at one time, immense charm and a surprising vitality. Her gestures, her intonations were perfect.

It is interesting to consider how Gladys Cooper has succeeded in turning herself from an indifferent actress into an extremely accomplished one. I have a notion that her beauty has been at once her greatest asset and her greatest handicap; an asset because without it she would never have gone on the stage, for she is not the born actress who whatever she looks like is impelled by her nature to act (she would have competently run a business or, married to a landowner, managed an estate); a handicap for reasons which I shall now suggest. Of course it is well than an actress should have a certain comeliness; if she is too homely it is hard to persuade an audience, however well she acts, that she may be the object of a passionate love; and though it may not be true that love makes the world go round, love requited or unrequited is in general the mainspring of the theatre; but there is a certain coldness in perfect beauty which is, not repellent, to say that would be an exaggeration, but not alluring.[1] Some irregularity of feature perhaps enables an actress to display emotion more effectively, and unless she is very plain she can with make-up and sympathetic lighting render herself sufficiently attractive. From her portraits we know that Mrs Siddons had a statuesque beauty that was not only imposing but positively awe-inspiring, but we know also that this somewhat restricted the range of parts in which she was at her greatest. We can see her as Volumnia or Lady Macbeth, but we can’t imagine her romping through an eighteenth-century farce. Eleonora Duse had fine eyes and an attractive face, but she was not a great beauty; she could play with equal virtuosity Goldoni’s La Locandiera and D’Annunzio’s La Città Morta. The point I want to make is that classical features limit the power of an actress to display the variety of emotion which a part may require. Charm is an indefinable thing; it is not often combined with the extreme of beauty.

If Miss Cooper has succeeded in overcoming the handicap of her startling beauty it is to be ascribed, I think, to the passing of the years, to her great common sense and to industry. Age, which has left her beauty almost unimpaired, has given her face an expressiveness which in youth it lacked. From Mr Stokes’s book you will get the idea that she created parts, by the light of nature, as it were, without effort. I do not believe that. It is true that when she played in the movies she did not trouble to read the entire script, but was content to learn her own lines and then was able to give a performance so good that she received more than once the awards which Hollywood confers on an outstanding performance. I think in this case her wide experience enabled her to get into the heart of a character by intuition and so play it for all it was worth. But that was the reward for years of hard work.

It was not till after the first world war that she acted in any of my plays. She was then established in The Playhouse, the most popular actress of her day, with an immense and enthusiastic following. She was not only very beautiful, but an extremely competent actress. Mr Stokes appears to think that, with all these advantages, she went her own way indifferent to direction. That is not the impression I got when I watched the rehearsing of my plays. I found her conscientious and eager to do her best. I saw her directed by Gerald du Maurier and Charles Hawtrey. As she very well knew, both of them knew their business. My recollection is that she took their suggestions without question and was able very quickly to do what they required. When either du Maurier or Hawtrey wanted her to do something in a different way she never hesitated to try it, and try it again, till she had satisfied herself and him. One trifling incident occurs to me: in a play of mine called The Letter, in order to get a crucial dramatic effect Miss Cooper had on a sudden to fall to the floor in a dead faint. That is not an easy thing to do in a natural manner without hurting oneself. For fear of this, the first time she rehearsed it, Miss Cooper did it with some hesitation, whereupon Gerald du Maurier, by doing it himself, which was his useful way of directing, showed her how it could be done with effect and without danger. She tried it perhaps half a dozen times till he cried: “That’s right!” and ever afterwards she did it exactly as he had shown her.

She was prepared to leave nothing undone that could be done by hard work to make her performance as good as she possibly could. And you could rely on her. She was not one of those tiresome creatures who may give a perfect performance one day and a poor one on the next. These plays of mine had long runs and from my point of view as a dramatist not the least of Miss Cooper’s merits was that, however long the run was, her performance never varied. Of course she had to be suited. The actress doesn’t exist who can play equally well Katherine of Aragon and Millamant, Ophelia and Hedda Gabler.[2] It appears that Miss Cooper was at one time induced to play parts in two of Shakespeare’s plays. I am not surprised that she did not please the critics. She is essentially modern. But for all that she has a wide range. She played in three plays[3] of mine and in one[4] that was dramatised by an American playwright from one of my novels. I did not write these plays for her, I wrote them for themselves; but I greatly admired her and it was inevitable that I should bear in mind the probability that she might care to act in them, with the result that the character I invented was more or less unconsciously coloured by this, just as long before the plays I had written with Irene Vanbrugh in mind were coloured by my knowledge of her brilliant talent. The four women Miss Cooper portrayed in the plays to which I am now referring were, unless I deceive myself, as different as the creatures of an author can be (and to some extent an author remains like himself, for himself is all he has to offer), and each of these parts she characterised admirably. For by the time she came to act my plays Miss Cooper, by the hard work to which I had drawn attention and by an unceasing desire to do her best, had become a very fine actress. I owe much to her. And now she has mastered her profession. She cannot go on playing Relative Values for ever. Is there no young dramatist to write a play that will give her the opportunity to display her truly remarkable gifts?[5]

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[1] Cf. Ten Novels and Their Authors, Heinemann, 1954, p. 230: “But beauty is not the only thing that makes a woman attractive; indeed, great beauty is often somewhat chilling: you admire, but are not moved.” Ed.
[2] Katherine of Aragon from Henry VIII (1613) by Shakespeare and Fletcher, Millamant from The Way of the World (1700) by Congreve, Ophelia from Hamlet (c. 1601) by Shakespeare, and Hedda Gabler from the play of the same name (1891) by Ibsen. Ed.
[3] Home and Beauty (1919), The Letter (1927) and The Sacred Flame (1929). JW.
[4] The Painted Veil by Bartlett Cormack (1931). JW.
[5] Miss Cooper’s truly remarkable gifts must have been displayed to the full in a 1966 revival of The Sacred Flame in which she played Mrs Tabret. This was 37 years after the premiere in which she created the role of Stella. Maugham had died on the previous year. Ed.… (más)

bookshelves: film-only, winter-20132014, biography, published-1928, under-10-ratings
Read from February 09 to 17, 2014

the basis for the film 'Isadora' (1968) starring Vanessa Redgrave.

Description: 928. This is the story of the life of an American dancer, written by one who knew her and called her a friend. Duncan was born in San Francisco and at the age of 25 joined Loie Fuller's dance company, touring Germany where she was acclaimed in Budapest and Vienna. Two years later, she established a dance school for children near Berlin at Gruenwald. In 1921, Duncan was invited to Russia where she opened another dance school in Moscow and married Sergey Yesenin, the Russian poet. Tragically, Duncan was killed in an automobile accident in 1927

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