Walter Hampden Dougherty Bio/Wiki, Net Worth, Married 2018
Walter Hampden is the artist name of Walter Hampden Dougherty (June 30, 1879 in Brooklyn – June 11, 1955 in Los Angeles) was a U.S. actor and theatre manager. He was the son of John Hampden Dougherty and Alice Hill. He was a younger brother of the American painter Paul Dougherty (1877-1947).He went to England for apprenticeship for six years. Later, he played Hamlet, Henry V and Cyrano de Bergerac on Broadway. In 1925, he became manager of the Colonial Theatre on Broadway, which was renamed Hampden's Theatre from 1925 to 1931. He became noted for his Shakespearean roles as well as for Cyrano, which he played in several productions between 1923 and 1936. Hampden's last stage role was as Danforth in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.John Garrett Underhill produced the first English-language version of The Bonds of Interest (Los intereses creados) by Jacinto Benavente, with Walter Hampden, in 1929.Hampden appeared in a few silent films, but did not really begin his film career in earnest until 1939, when he played the good Archbishop of Paris (Frollo's brother) in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. This was Hampden's first sound film; he was sixty at the time he made it. Several other roles followed—Jarvis Langdon in the 1944 film The Adventures of Mark Twain among them, but all were supporting character roles, not the lead roles that Hampden played onstage. He had a small, but notable role as the long-winded dinner speaker in the first scene of All About Eve (1950), and played the father of Humphrey Bogart and William Holden in Billy Wilder's 1954 comedy Sabrina. These last two films are arguably those for which Hampden is most well known to modern audiences. He also played long-bearded patriarchs in biblical epics like The Silver Chalice (1954) and The Prodigal (1955). (In The Silver Chalice, he was Joseph of Arimathea.)Hampden reprised his legendary portrayal of Hercule Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac in the first episode of the radio program Great Scenes from Great Plays, which Hampden hosted from 1948-1949. In addition to his radio roles (The Adventures of Leonidas Witherall), Hampden also appeared in several dramas during the early days of television. He made his TV debut in 1949, playing Macbeth for the last time at the age of 69.His last role was the non-singing one of King Louis XI of France, considered by some to be one of his best performances, in the otherwise unremarkable 1956 Technicolor remake of Rudolf Friml's 1925 operetta The Vagabond King. It was released posthumously, more than a year after Hampden's death.For 27 years, Walter Hampden was president of the Players' Club. The club's library is named for him.His ashes are buried at The Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
Survived by his widow, Mabel, and daughter, Mary, and son, Paul.
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Brian Hooker's translation of Cyrano de Bergerac was prepared for Hampden. The next major English language translation was by Anthony Burgess, and was prepared for Christopher Plummer who, like Hampden, had previously played Hamlet. This translation has Cyrano make a reference to Hamlet, his list of insults to his own nose climaxing with "and finally, with tragic cries and sighs, in language finely wrought and deeply felt, 'Oh, that this too, too solid nose would melt.'" This translation has since been performed by Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, and Kevin Kline, all of whom have also played Hamlet. Subsequent cinematic Cyrano Gérard Depardieu also appeared in Branagh's film Hamlet (1996).
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Had 2 children - Mabel and Paul
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A revered figure of the American theater, Hampden was president of the Players' Club for 27 years.
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Hampden owned and operated Hampden's Theatre on Broadway at 62nd St. after he bought the Colonial, a 20-year-old theater that had been used for vaudeville for practically its entire life span. Hampden and his company opened his theater on October 10, 1925 with "Hamlet." (It was the second time he had tackled the role; Ethel Barrymore, sister of his Shakespearian rival John Barrymore, the great American Hamlet of the 20th century, was his Ophelia.) Hampden staged 16 plays, in total, at the theater, including his great success "Cyrano de Bergerac," before closing the theater in March 1930 as The Great Depression began its oppression of the New York theater during the Thirties. In 1931, the Hampden became a movie house, the RKO Colonial Theatre. After returning to the Broadway fold as a legitimate house in 1974 (the Harkness Theatre), it was razed in 1977.
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From 1922, when John Barrymore staged his first Hamlet, until 1975, when Sam Waterston assayed the role, Barrymore and Hampden were the only American actors to play Hamlet on Broadway. Hampden played the role three times on the Great White Way: in 1918, 1925 and 1929. Stephen Lang, who played the Dane in 1992, is the only other American in more than three-quarters of a century to star in "Hamlet" on Broadway. In that time, Hamlet was dominated by British performers, particularly Maurice Evans, an English immigrant who became an American citizen, who was the only other man since World War One to play Hamlet three times on the Broadway stage. The other British subjects to play the role on Broadway in that period were Sir John Gielgud (considered by many to be THE Hamlet of the 20th century), Leslie Howard, Sir Donald Wolfit, future Canadian Stratford Festival founder John Neville, Richard Burton, Nicol Williamson (considered by some to be the definitive portrayal of the late 1960s) and Ralph Fiennes, who won a Tony in the role. The Frenchman Jean-Louis Barrault followed in his countrywoman Sarah Bernhardt's steps and played Hamlet on Broadway, he in 1952, she in 1900. Aside from Barrymore's acclaimed performance, the greatest Hamlet assayed by an American actor was that of Edwin Booth, who played the role three times on Broadway in the 19th century.
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The New Colonial Theatre, in New York, was re-named Hampden's Theatre in 1925, in his honor. It kept the name until 1931.
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After the 1923 production of "Cyrano de Bergerac", Hampden brought his Cyrano back to Broadway four more times - in 1926, 1928, 1932 and 1936, though not always with the same actors playing the same roles.
He was the most famous "Cyrano de Bergerac" of his time, playing the role onstage from 1923 to 1936, when he permanently retired from playing it, except at a benefit performance in which he performed the final scene, and in which José Ferrer, the most famous 1940s-'50s Cyrano, also did a scene from the play. The classic Brian Hooker translation of the play, which has been used by every English and American Cyrano until recently, was made especially for Hampden. Active on stage from the early 1900s, he did not make his sound film debut until 1939. Hampden never played a leading role in films, as he nearly always did on stage and as he once did on television, but he headed the supporting cast in such films as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and The Vagabond King (1956)--his last, and posthumously released, film. As a sort of "in-joke", it is Hampden who appears as the long-winded elderly stage actor who gives Anne Baxter her award statuette in the first scene of All About Eve (1950).
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In 1949, made his TV debut at the age of 69 - as Macbeth!
$17 Million
