Maude Adams Experiences Tragedies
Her Mother, Grandmother, and the Sinking of the Lusitania.
Maude's life held devastating tragedies in 1915. In that year her mother and grandmother died. Adding to this sorrow, the Lusitania, a passenger ship, was sunk by a German U-boat. Maude's manager, Charles Frohman, died aboard the ill-fated vessel.
Maude Retires From the Theater
Because of her extended grief, Maude decided to retire from acting, at least temporarily. However, she did return to the theater to do two more performances. Thirteen years after Frohman's death she portrayed Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Her final stage performance came in 1934. At a theater in Maine, Maude Adams played Maria in Twelfth Night. Although being a star was now behind her, Maude was not ready to quit.
In 1937, she accepted a staff position at Stephens, a junior college for girls in Columbia, Missouri. There, she was the head of the drama department until retiring in 1950.
Maude's retirement was short. After complications from pleurisy and being hospitalized, she died on July 17, 1953, at her home in Tannersville, New York. This great lady of the American Theater, who grew up to be Peter Pan, was eighty-one years young.
Previous: Maude Adams Heads West: Juliet and Joan of Arc Wait in the Wings.
Recommended Reading:
Joaquin Murrietta: Down the California Outlaw Trail.
Murrietta, born about 1830, was a California bandit during the Gold Rush years.
Anne Hutchinson. Hutchinson found that the staunch Puritans of New England and the Massachusetts clergy considered her words to be an attack on their rigid moral and legal codes.
Source:
Chartier, JoAnn. Chris Euss. Gilded Girls: Women Entertainers of the Old West. Globe Pequot Press, Guilford, Connecticut and Helena, Montana, 2003.
Robbins, Phyllis. Maude Adams: An Intimate Portrait. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1956.
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