Hayes, Helen

(1900-1993)

   Born Helen Brown in Washington, D.C., to an actress and a salesman, Helen Hayes debuted at the age of five with a stock company. She then appeared in Lew Fields's Broadway musical Old Dutch (1909). After other musicals, Hayes graduated to teenage roles with Polyanna (1917), Penrod (1918), and playing opposite William Gillette in Dear Brutus (1918). Beginning with Clarence (1919), her demure, natural acting, which departed from the more histrionic approach typical in the 1920s, elevated her stature.

   During the early 1920s, flapper roles in To the Ladies (1922), We Moderns (1924), and Dancing Mothers (1924) won her a following, but Hayes wisely challenged herself in a 1925 revival of She Stoops to Conquer (1924) and George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (1925). In 1926, Hayes assayed her favorite role, Maggie, in a revival of What Every Woman Knows, which she followed with Coquette (1927), battling the show's producer, Jed Harris, who sued her when she became pregnant (her husband was playwright Charles MacArthur*) and left the show during the run. After 1930 and throughout her long career, Hayes appeared with distinction in a range of classic and contemporary roles, almost all of which enhanced her title as one of the "First Ladies of the American Theatre," along with contemporaries Lynn Fontanne and Katharine Cornell. Among her many standout performances after 1930 was her signature role as Queen Victoria in Victoria Regina* (1935).