Thoughts on Aging Actresses

I’m catching up with a backlog of blog post ideas after nearly a month of preoccupation with moving. . .

Back on March 31, Barbara Rush, an actress with a career that spanned seven decades, died at 97, suffering from dementia. Her Washington Post obituary was spiked with the kind of saucy quotes that led me to think I really would have enjoyed knowing her. One, which my own family members could probably imagine me saying, was this one: “I’m one of those kinds of people who will perform the minute you open the refrigerator door and the light goes on.”

But Rush also acknowledged the challenges facing an aging actress, referencing “this terrible Sahara Desert between 40 and 60, when you went from ingenue to old lady”—a period in which “you either didn’t work or you pretended you were 20.”

In my research on the life of Emily Hale, the amateur actress who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet T. S. Eliot, I did not turn up any instances when she made similar complaints. (But since Eliot destroyed the bulk of her letters from their 27-year correspondence, those comments might have gone missing.) Still, I imagine that Hale, like all actresses, must have wrestled with this problem, even if she kept her thoughts to herself.

When Eliot first courted her in 1913-14, Hale was an active amateur actress in the Boston area, often playing ingenues or the romantic lead in plays, including Roxane in a notable production of Cyrano de Bergerac. The roles included one of the young-adult children of the matriarch Alice in the J. M. Barrie play Alice Sit-by-the-Fire in 1916. But within five years, when she was just shy of 30, she aged into the role of Alice when her Simmons College students performed the play.

In 1928, at the age of 36, Hale chaperoned one of her college students on a transatlantic passage. But she was already feeling her age. Her traveling companion, Margaret Farrand Thorp, wrote her mother that as they watched as their younger charge was pursued by male passenger, she and Hale could “feel the years slip off,” but that they were not able to enjoy that for long before they felt “obliged to retire to corners and become middle-aged—like Barrie’s Rosalind.” (Hale had previously performed the play about an aging actress who yearns to live an ordinary life, rather than having to keep pretending she was young.)

As she moved into middle age, Hale started turning more to directing than acting. But she still found age-appropriate roles. A favorite one was Judith Bliss in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, a leading part described as a mother between the ages of  40 and 60. Just months before she turned 40, she played  Lady Margaret, the mother of a Scottish chieftain, in scenes taken from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. The following year, she played Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a character between the ages of 50 and 65.

But she then took a nearly decade-long break from acting. As she was about to turn 49, she played the oldest part, the matriarch Mrs. McQueston, in a Wisconsin Players’ production of Maxwell Anderson’s The Wingless Victory. The opportunity came when she attended graduate-school courses at the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 1941.

By the time Hale reached her 60s, the secondary school students she directed viewed her as a somewhat imposing older woman. Hale co-directed a 13-year-old Sam Waterston, star of films, Broadway and the long-running shows Law & Order and Grace and Frankie, with the help of his father, who led the drama program at the Brooks School outside of Boston. Waterston wrote me that he remembered “an image of a woman in a black dress and an air of authority. . . .” Perhaps his father had told him that “Miss Hale was impressive,” perhaps “she was a presence.” In any case, he joked, “All I remember was a strong feeling that I ought to behave.”

Jane Christie, one of the students Hale directed at Abbot Academy, remembered when Eliot visited Hale at her boarding school in 1956. She and her friends never dreamed that their aging teacher had been romantically involved with the famous poet. After Hale retired and Christie went on to Smith College, she and some of her classmates went to see their teacher perform in the comedy Solid Gold Cadillac in Northampton, Massachusetts. Christie recalled that their expectations were low because Hale was then close to 70 and playing a role that Judy Holliday had just filmed at the age of 35. But Christie said that Hale “stole the show” with her “good comic timing.”

Hale capped off her amateur acting career with a role that suited her age, her particular talents and a lifetime of exasperation with a difficult, well-educated Brit: at the age of 73, she played the mother of Henry Higgins in the Concord (Massachusetts) Players’ production of My Fair Lady. Citing “every speech, every move, every gesture” she made, one local critic wrote: “Aspiring actresses would do well to study the performance of Miss Emily Hale. As Higgins’s mother, she dominated every scene she was in.” Hale herself recalled it as “a very happy, rather remarkable ‘come back,’” providing her with “a warmth of friendliness each night from all on the scene—stage hands and actors.”

Over the course of their lives, Barbara Rush and Emily Hale both displayed an admirable resilience for dealing with the problems they encountered in their lives. Learning how to age as actresses was a prime example.