Lindsay, Howard

(1889-1968)

   Born in Waterford, New York, Howard Lindsay became a versatile theatre man, with notable successes as playwright, actor, director, and producer. Educated at Harvard University, Lindsay attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, after which he worked as an actor. He toured with McKee Rankin, worked in vaudeville and burlesque, and was a member of Margaret Anglin's company beginning in 1913 and continuing until he went into the military during World War I. Anglin acted in Lindsay's first produced play, Billeted (1917). After the war, Lindsay's A Young Man's Fancy (1919) failed, but he directed and acted in George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly's comedy Dulcy (1921). During the 1920s, he directed Booth Tarkington's The Wren (1921), Kaufman and Connelly's To the Ladies and The '49ers (1922), Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1923) starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Aaron Hoffman's The Good Old Days (1923), Kaufman and Herman J. Mankiewicz's The Good Fellow (1926), Edwin Burke's This Thing Called Love (1928), and his own play Tommy (1927), written in collaboration with Bertrand Robinson, with whom he also wrote Your Uncle Dudley (1929) and Oh, Promise Me (1930). Lindsay acted in several of these. After 1930 he collaborated almost exclusively with Russel Crouse* and they won the Pulitzer Prize for State of the Union* (1945) and a Tony Award* for their libretto of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's* The Sound of Music (1959) and scored a record-setting success with the comedy Life with Father* (1939), in which Lindsay played the lead opposite his wife, Dorothy Stickney.