Clara Morris

Clara Morris (1846-9 – November 20, 1925) was a Canadian/American stage actress of the Victorian Era.

Early life Actress Clara Morris was born in Toronto, the eldest child of a bigamous marriage. Sources disagree on the year of her birth, writing it as any of the years from 1846 – 1849, inclusive.

When she was three, her father, whose name was La Montagne, was exposed as a bigamist and her mother moved with Clara to Cleveland, where they adopted Clara's grandmother's name, Morrison. Young Clara received only scanty schooling. In circa 1860 she became a ballet girl in the resident company of the Cleveland Academy of Music, shortening her name to Morris at that time.

Career

Stage After nine years of training with that company she played a leading lady at Wood's Theatre in Cincinnati in 1869. She then appeared in Halifax, Nova Scotia for a summer, and with Joseph Jefferson in Louisville, before going to New York City in 1870. She made her New York debut in September in Man and Wife, directed by Augustin Daly at his Fifth Avenue Theatre. The role had come to her by chance, but she made such an impression in it that Daly starred her in a series of highly emotional roles over the next three years in such plays as No Name, Delmonico's, L'Article 47, Alixe, Jezebel, and Madeline Morel.

In retirement in Riverdale, New York, she contributed articles on acting to various magazines, wrote a daily newspaper column for ten years, and published numerous books.

Legacy There is a plaque on the grounds of the Cleveland Public Library marking the location of Clara Morris' home when she was young. The plaque reads: "On this site, in her girlhood, lived Clara Morris. With limited opportunities she overcame privation and, in her twenties, was recognized as the leading emotional actress on the American stage."

The Clara Morris School, located at 1900 St. Clair Avenue NE, was part of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District until the building was torn down in 1968. Opened in 1868, the building was originally named the St. Clair School and held 16 rooms with "the windows, pointed in the Gothic manner."

Roles

Other notable roles of her career are:

Anne Silvester in Man and Wife Lucy Carter in Saratoga Mme. D'Artigues in Jezebel Tilburnia in The Critic Magdalen Vanstone in No Name Constance Sherman in Delmonico's, or Larks Up the Hudson Miss Lulu Tibbetts in An Angel

Works For some years after 1885, she devoted herself mainly to literary work, writing:

In culture Barbara Wallace Grossman published A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage in 2009, chronicling Morris' "importance as a feminist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

Oscar Wilde, during his visit to America in 1882, saw her perform in The New Magdalen. "Miss Morris is the greatest actress I ever saw," he later wrote. "If it be fair to form an opinion of her from her rendition of this one role, we have no such powerfully intense actress in England. She is a great artist, in my sense of the word, because all she does, all she says, in the matter of the doing and of the saying constantly evoke the imagination to supplement it. That is what I mean by art. She is a veritable genius." See Roy Morris, Declaring His Genius - Oscar Wilde in North America The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2013. pp. 39–40. She was "perhaps the world's first method actor," notes author Morris.