A
Glimpse of Theater History
MATILDA HERON (1830-77), America's
Definitive Camille
January
22, 1857, a half filled house at Wallack's Theater
in New York saw the meteoric rise to stardom of the woman many see as
the founder of the "emotional school" of acting. The play was
the actress' own adaptation of the already popular Dumas fils' vehicle
La Dame aux Camelias. Her version, Camille or the Fate of a
Coquette, was to revolutionize not only the part of Camille, but the
course of acting in America.
Though early accounts of her childhood and youth are unreliable, she was apparently born in poverty in Londonderry, Ireland in 1830. Matilda came to Philadelphia in 1842 with her parents and two sisters Fanny and Agnes. Her father soon died. According to Ludlow, in February 1849, Matilda performed with her mother and sisters at his theatre in New Orleans, the St. Charles, in the farce Old and Young and the comic opera The Waterman, with Matilda singing the very difficult role of Tom Tug.
The
comedian Henry Edwards, however, claims that she made her first professional
appearance in 1851 at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia (right).
We do know that she studied with Peter Richings and played Bianca in the
then standard tragedy Fazio at the Walnut Street Theater Feb.,
17, 1851. By the following year she had established her own career separate
from her mother and her sisters. She appeared at the Bowery Theater in
New York under Hamblin's management in the remarkably varied characters
of Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Mrs. Haller, Ophelia, Parthenia and Pauline.
While she was performing at the American Theater in San Francisco in 1853, George Wilkes of New York's The Spirit of the Times saw her performance, probably as Bianca in Fazio, and predicted her later success:
|
The style of Miss Heron is a most peculiar one. When you first see her, it jars with all your preconceived notions of what you consider"acting." There is nothing of the actress about her, and your first impression is, that she has mistaken her vocation. ...Generally in her earlier scenes there is an utter absence of effort. ... In this gliding ease consists her deepest art. ... To satisfy an audience, a performer must progress in merit from the first scene to the last. It will not do to begin well and continue only as well as he commenced; he must end better than he began. .. We admit, therefore, that the style of Miss Heron is fluctuating and uneven; but it is the unevenness of Nature, which takes repose between great efforts. ... This was the unevenness that made Kean great; an unevenness that is described to us by one who saw him in Othello, as making him look in the first two acts like a little slipshod tailor, but which, in the third, increased him to the measure of Jove, with the lightnings shooting through his fingers! ... The chief peculiarity of Matilda Heron's style is its quiet intensity in the passages where others rave. ... In ordinary passages, though always correct, she is sometimes tame. ... But give her a scene in which she can create,--some character in which her genius can step beyond the author's lines and have full scope to second him with her imagination, and she is truly great. An oriental fable tells of two magnificent hunting dogs presented to Alexander the Great by a barbarian chieftain. Alexander tried them in the chase for a stag, found them useless, and had them killed. But the donor wrung his hands and said, "Oh, mighty king, had you but set those dogs to hunt lions, you would have seen what creatures they were!" Miss Heron's acting is like that; she must hunt lions. |
In
June of 1854, while still in San Francisco, she entered into a brief,
disastrous marriage with a young lawyer, Henry Herbert Byrne. According
to one account, he wanted her to give up the stage. She apparently convinced
him that she should go East to fill certain engagements and would travel
to Europe as she had already planned. Whatever mysterious impetus made
her make that peculiar newlywed bargain may in some measure account for
her reaction to the performance of La Dame aux Camilias which Matilda
saw the following year in Paris. The Marguerite Gauthier was the celebrated
Mme. Doche. By October 1855 of that year, Matilda had adapted and presented
her Camille. During the following year, she took her play to many
of the regional centers of the United States before her engagement at
Wallack's. She played eight weeks in New Orleans, and performed it in
St. Louis and Cincinnati as well. By the time she premiered the work in
New York, she had no doubt perfected the role. Supported by E.A.
Sothern as Armand, Miss Heron's performance was greeted with universal
and giddy praise. Adam Badeau rhapsodized on that occasion:
|
There came upon the stage a fine woman with an easy manner, and who spoke two or three words in a natural tone. I was surprised at the phenomenon, and attended to what she should do or say next. Of course, I was amazed at her daring portrait of Camille; but when the curtain fell at the end of the first act I acknowledged the spell of genius. As the play went on I became absorbed. By and by, eye and ear were both touched by an electricity that reached brain and heart; and ere the climax, I had experienced such a wrenching and tightening of emotions, such a whirlwind of feeling, as made criticism impossible. ... And first of all her naturalness. This first demands applause from the most discerning critic, and ends by provoking cavils. This first forces itself upon your notice. ... this is the great secret of her acting,--is her talent, ay, and her art. Surely naturalness cannot be decried. And yet this is not only her great peculiarity, it is, perhaps, her fault. She is absolutely too natural. She portrays a character exactly as it is, not without one touch of grace not its own, but with every touch of awkwardness belonging to it. She not only adds nothing, but subtracts nothing. She not only idealizes not, refines not, elevates not; she eliminates nothing coarse or displeasing; she spares no harrowing thought, no disgusting minutiae; she is not only terrible in her life-likeness, but at times offensive. And yet this very offensiveness adds to her thrall over you; you are held in spite of your dislike because of it. The vulgarity of the earlier scenes in Camille is fearful in its faithfulness, but effective as well; the repulsiveness of the sick-bed scene is painfully real. And here Miss Heron differs from any other actress I have seen. All others refine, in some degree, either by throwing a charm around the character that it cannot really claim, or by concealing defects which it absolutely possesses. Here, too, Miss Heron differs especially from the great French actress with whom she has sometimes been compared; for this Western performer has indeed thrust herself into the foremost rank, and is to be judged only buy comparison with the foremost. ... She has a field all her own; not classic, not ideal, not terrible; but womanly, passionate, human. |
Ned Wilkins rhapsodized in the Herald:
| The heroine is a bad woman, who seduces a spooney young man, then makes extraordinary sacrifices for him and finally dies of consumption. It is a well written play, dramatically speaking, and affords the greatest opportunity for strong effects. MIss Heron is an actress who deals in strong effects. Miss Davenport played Camille well. She was like a safe, strong ocean steamer, well constructed in every part, carrying just enough steam to make good time, and bring her passengers safe into port. Miss [Laura] Keene resembled a nicely built beautifully fitted up yacht, gliding among pleasant scenes giving you glimpses of Etruscan vales and Claude Lorraine Landscapes, throwing vivid color over all around. Miss Heron we should describe as a high pressure first class Western steamboat, with all her fires up, extra weights on the safety valve, and not less than forty pounds of steam to the square inch. The effect is fine, but the danger of an explosion imminent. |
William Winter said of her that she "acted" other parts, but she "lived" Camille. Even though she was extremely clever and self sufficient; even though she wrote or adapted a number of plays for herself, she was destitute and old before her time by January 17, 1872 when a benefit performance in New York was organized at Niblo's Garden which included appearances by Edwin Booth, Laura Keene, Fanny Janauschek and other great stars. In five years she was dead. Henry Edwards said of her final days, "The close of her life was of the saddest character. ... Poor in the bitterest acceptation of the term, prematurely old, and with the once sparkling intellect dimmed and gone astray, she presented a spectacle...that the coldest heart could but regard with pity.