Forgotten Today, Gertrude Lawrence
Was Arguably The Brightest Star Ever
To Grace The Cape Playhouse Stage
by Kevin N. Keegan
Member, Dennis Historical Society Board of Directors
The Cape Playhouse spotlight may never have burned brighter than it did for Gertrude Lawrence.
And that is because Lawrence was arguably the most famous actress ever to grace the summer theatre’s storied stage. A star of international renown, an idol of the interwar generation, a singer and dancer in New York and London musicals, and Gertie to her friends, she fell in love with Playhouse Producing Director Richard Aldrich and spent parts of the final 12 years at her life on Cape Cod at her summer home in East Dennis.
A household name for her critically acclaimed portrayals on the biggest Broadway and West End stages—and the centerpiece of countless newspaper and magazine stories—Lawrence had never performed at a summer theatre when she agreed to come to The Cape Playhouse in August 1939 to star in Samson Raphaelson’s new comedy Skylark before the play headed to New York. Although this was Raymond Moore’s final year guiding The Playhouse, he had given more and more responsibility to Aldrich, who had a major role in the negotiations that brought Lawrence to Dennis for the first time.
As Aldrich remembers in his 1954 book, Gertrude Lawrence as Mrs A: An Intimate Biography of a Great Star, he was astonished by Lawrence’s pre-visit demands for her brief summer sojourn on Cape Cod: “a cottage by the lake, sufficiently near the Playhouse for convenience but distant enough for complete privacy. Besides generous accommodations for herself and any guests she might wish to invite, the star would need rooms for her personal maid and a secretary, garage space for her town car, and grounds for Mac, her West Highland terrier.”
Aldrich further writes that “I was instructed to place an order with a florist to keep the vases in Miss Lawrence’s cottage filled with fresh flowers, preferably lilies, her favorite. The Playhouse commissary should be at pains to see that Miss Lawrence’s refrigerator was well-stocked with a list of delicacies that ranged from caviar and avocados and sweetbreads through melons, quail, pâté de foie gras, and rainbow trout.”
“What,” thought Aldrich, “did Gertrude Lawrence think a summer theatre was? And who did she think she was? I could tell her in less than ten words: a spoiled pampered actress with a prima donna complex.”
But Radie Harris, a newspaper gossip columnist and friend of Lawrence’s, let Aldrich in on a little show business secret: that those demands were actually from John Golden, Lawrence’s agent, who spent much of his time building up the actress’s star value. And as Harris reminded Aldrich: “Look, you started the star system. You want stars, you’ll have to treat them as stars”
According to Aldrich, he met Lawrence in the rain the night that summer she arrived at the Yarmouth train station—found then where the tracks cross Willow Street but now long gone—complete with her jewel case, make-up kit, and “piece after piece of handsome [Louis] Vuitton luggage [piled] until [it] grew into a sizable hillock on the platform…. Then with a timing I mentally applauded, a slim, golden-haired figure appeared at the top of the [train] car steps. She stood poised, a little above me, darkness surrounding her, the lamplight on her eager face.”
And so it was that The Cape Playhouse’s greatest off-stage love story began.
As Lawrence stepped off the train in Yarmouth that August night and into Richard Aldrich’s summer theatre world, she was at the height of her celebrity as perhaps the most famous stage actress on two continents. She had starred in 1923 at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre in Noel Coward’s first musical revue, London Calling!—he was Lawrence’s friend, had written the show specifically for her, and had joined her in headlining the musical, as seen in the photo above—and in the years immediately following, she had starred in André Charlot’s London Revue of 1924 (New York Herald Tribune theatre critic Percy Hammond wrote of her acting in that show that “Every man is now, or will be, in love with her”) and Charlot’s Revue of 1926, both on Broadway.
In late 1926, Lawrence became the first British actress to headline an American-written musical on New York’s Great White Way when she starred in Oh, Kay!, with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. The show received additional acclaim during a 1927 run in London, and Lawrence released the show’s signature song, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” which became one of the top ten singles of 1927 while rising to number 2 on the record charts.
Lawrence captivated London audiences for a sold-out three-month run in 1930 in Private Lives—a play Coward again had written for her and in which he himself also starred, along with Laurence Olivier—before the show came to Broadway in early 1931. Reviews for the New York performances were overwhelming positive, with Lawrence’s acting lauded as “exquisite and light” and “alluring, provocative.” As Coward remembered years later, “Sometimes, in Private Lives, I would look at her across the stage and she would simply take my breath away; I can think of nobody living or dead who ever gave to my work as much as she did.”
Despite the Great Depression throughout the 1930s, Lawrence continued to have acting success on both sides of the Atlantic that included her starring in the major British-made films Mimi (1935, opposite Douglas Fairbanks Jr) and Rembrandt (1936, alongside Charles Laughton), as well as her again teaming up with Coward in his Tonight at 8:30, a series of nine one-act plays—once again created as a starring opportunity for Lawrence—performed over three successive nights that first wowed London audiences (1936) before a successful run in New York (1936-37).
A June 1938 cover story in LIFE magazine featured Lawrence and noted—this was nine years before the Tony Awards would be instituted—that the “tousled-headed little English girl was this year conceded the best performance of any actress on Broadway” in Susan and God. The fledgling NBC television network aired a performance of Susan and God as the first full-length broadcast of a live play in American TV history, though the audience was minuscule because so few people at that time owned television sets.
And so it was that megastar Gertrude Lawrence found herself at The Cape Playhouse in late Summer 1939 to star with Glenn Anders (above left) and Donald Cook (right) in Skylark. As Sheridan Morley writes in Gertrude Lawrence, his 1981 biography, “As they rehearsed and played Skylark on the Cape that summer, Gertie found herself increasingly drawn to the rather ‘Boston Brahmin’ figure of Aldrich; feeling no part of her Broadway world, he tried at first to stay out of her way… until Radie Harris convinced him to take her out one night after a show…. By the end of The Playhouse’s production of Skylark, it was clear to Gertie and Richard—and even to a few members of the company—that they may have something going for them.”
According to the Mid-Cape newspaper, The Register, Lawrence’s starring one-week role in Skylark broke all Cape Playhouse box office records for ticket sales for a single production. After Skylark’s subsequent success on Broadway—and with the first year of World War II raging in Europe with little chance for her to go back to England—Lawrence agreed to return to The Playhouse in 1940 to open the summer season by reprising her role as Amanda Prynne in Private Lives opposite celebrated English actor Richard Haydn, with the understanding, according to Aldrich in Gertrude Lawrence as Mrs. A, that “the proceeds of the play were to be donated to Allied War Relief.” They were.
Another reason Lawrence wanted to return to Dennis was so she could marry Aldrich. According to biographer Sheridan, “Aldrich had now taken over sole ownership of The Cape Playhouse, and Gertie had promised that in the brief holiday between the end of the Broadway run of Skylark and the start of a four-month nationwide tour, she would play his 1940 season. She told Aldrich during that week that she would also marry him, preferably on her 42nd birthday, American Independence Day, July 4, 1940.”
As Lawrence reveals in A Star Danced, her 1945 autobiography, “It was as though [Aldrich] combined in one person the different things I had found and admired in Philip Astley and in Bert Taylor [two earlier beaus]. He is Boston and Harvard, and had been a banker, but above all he loved the theatre. He was the first man in my life who understood what my career in theatre meant to me—the first man who really understood me.”
They were indeed married just after midnight that July 4—a second marriage for each—in a ceremony meant to be outdoors in a garden but forced inside because of sudden heavy rains. The location was a late 17th century home on Hope Lane near The Playhouse campus that Raymond Moore had owned before his passing earlier that year. In attendance were Dorothy Hood, Lawrence’s personal maid, and Francis Hart, who worked at The Playhouse, as the witnesses to the marriage ceremony officiated by local Presbyterian minister Paul M. Wilkinson. Lawrence’s wedding band, according to Marcia Monbleau in her 1991 history of The Cape Playhouse, was a $2 silver ring engraved with a good-luck symbol in Navajo lore that she had once admired in a shop window in Hyannis.
“After the ceremony and before the news reached the press,” Aldrich reports in his biography of his wife, she “sent off several dozen telegrams to the friends here and abroad she wanted to tell first. The message was the same to all. It read: LOVE FROM MRS. RICHARD STODDARD ALDRICH. THEATRICALLY KNOWN AS GERTRUDE LAWRENCE.”
Shortly thereafter, Lawrence received a clever cable back from her friend, playwright, and fellow stage star: “Dear Mrs. A.—Hooray, hooray/ At last you are deflowered!/ On this as every other day/ I love you!—Noel Coward.” Her response, also sent by cable: “Dear Mr. C.— You know me/ My parts I overact ‘em/ As for flowers, we searched for hours,/ My maid she must have packed ‘em.”
Although Lawrence and Aldrich had a home in Turtle Bay Gardens in Manhattan, by 1941 the couple had built their forever home within walking distance of Sesuit Harbor in East Dennis and with views well out into Cape Cod Bay. In a 1950 cover story for THE AMERICAN HOME magazine, Louisa Randall Church takes her readers behind the scenes at the Lawrence and Aldrich property they had named The Berries for the cranberry bog nearby. “This is the story,” Church writes, “of how she has made of her Cape Cod house in East Dennis, Massachusetts, a friendly warm background for the simple life she loves to lead the minute she bows at the closing curtain. She may be a most glamorous creature behind the footlights, but [at her home on Cape Cod], Mrs. Aldrich has expressed her deep-rooted love of homemaking.”
“From the minute one enters the driveway, shaded by an arch of trees, the world seems different,” Church continues. “Everywhere there is a profusion of beautiful blooms; a tiny flagstone walk leads to the door, with its string of sleighbells gently tugged to announce a caller. Everything within there is tranquillity. A narrow stairway is carpeted with soft rose homespun; woodwork is dead white, the old-fashioned doors have H and L hinges, wallpaper is pink clover-patterned. Silk parasols hang on the newel-post, a reminder of days gone by.”
“In fact, the unusual, delightful, out-of-the-ordinary thing about this …[charming] country home is the ‘feel’ of antiquity,” Church observes in the article’s final paragraphs. “Mrs. Aldrich describes this enchanting place as ‘the only real home I have’ with understandable pride, for here she has utilized her talents and character traits to their very best advantage to dramatize the private lives of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Aldrich, citizens of East Dennis, Cape Cod, Massachusetts.”
Throughout the 1940s, Lawrence spent much of her time off-Cape as she continued to build on her international celebrity. In 1941, for example, she was described as “Gertie the Great” in a story in TIME magazine for February 3, complete with a cover photo of her and a young Danny Kaye performing on Broadway in Moss Hart’s Lady in the Dark, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Theatre critic Richard Watts in the New York Herald Tribune wrote that “Lady in the Dark demonstrates with fine conclusiveness that Miss Gertrude Lawrence is the greatest feminine performer in the Theatre.”
A November 27, 1944, cover story in LIFE magazine about Lawrence details “her six-week entertainment tour of the Allied Front in France with a troupe of five British vaudevillians…. In the war-pocked towns of France, Belgium, and Holland, Miss Lawrence danced and sang her sophisticated ditties before 1,000,000 British and Canadian soldiers.”
As Lawrence herself notes in that LIFE story, “They were, Lord love them, grateful to us for the ‘sacrifices’ we made to appear before them, and they were patient beyond belief with our haphazard arrangements. We carried no drapes and no curtain, and the backdrops against which we performed ranged from stark walls to irrelevant little sets from dusty French dramas.”
Back on Broadway starting on December 26, 1945, and as seen above, Lawrence starred as Eliza Doolittle opposite Raymond Massey as professor Henry Higgins in a well-received staging of Pygmalion—later the basis for the musical My Fair Lady—at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
In his review the following day in The New York Herald Tribune, Otis Guernsey writes that “Last evening’s revival of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ was a most auspicious beginning for the new repertory group known as Theatre Incorporated [founded by Managing Director Richard Aldrich]…. The immaculate production, the art and enthusiasm of Miss Lawrence and her cohorts, and the timeless comedy script by G. B. S. have made this ‘Pygmalion’ an evening of great good humor.” And a rave write-up in The Sun that same week tells readers that “Eliza Doolittle is a natural for Miss Lawrence…. She makes the role a lustrous addition to an already list of memorable stage portraits.”
In the late 1940s, Lawrence starred in September Tide—still another play specifically written for her, this time by her friend Daphne du Maurier, bestselling novelist of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn—first in London and then on Broadway. Of the English production at The Aldwych Theatre, a reviewer in Theatre World noted Lawrence’s absence from the West End for 12 years and reported that “her brilliant acting in Daphne du Maurier’s new play has brought her a well-deserved personal triumph… [Since her last London performance in 1937], Miss Lawrence’s rare gifts as an actress have matured, her charm and grace fill the whole theatre, and her command of the stage is superb.”
Of course, when Lawrence was not garnering international plaudits for her London and Broadway roles throughout the 1940s, she was back in Dennis gracing The Cape Playhouse stage at least once each summer through 1950 to standing-room-only audiences, except when the theatre went dark from 1943 through 1945 during World War II.
After her sold-out run in Private Lives in Dennis in 1940, she came back the following summer in Behold We Live—a play she had starred in at The Saint James Theatre in London in 1932 alongside Sir Gerald du Maurier, Daphne’s father—this time opposite debonair actor Philip Merivale. As Morley notes in that 1981 Lawrence biography, “At the Cape that summer, Gertie and Richard Aldrich began to get themselves acclimatized to the idea of being a married couple; since their wedding a year earlier, they had spent a great deal more time apart than together, and in fact the war and Gertie’s career combined to separate them for much of their married life.”
In the summer of 1942, Lawrence returned to Dennis to headline Fallen Angels, another Noel Coward comedy. She also assisted in the running of The Playhouse, as Aldrich was by then enlisted as a lieutenant in the United States Navy during a World War II career that would see him serving at the US Advanced Amphibious Base in Southampton, England, from which he would join the 1944 D-Day invasion at Normandy. “The rest of that summer,” according to biographer Morley, “she spent decorating The Berries, inaugurating the Gertrude Lawrence branch of the American Theatre Wing… to entertain soldiers stationed however briefly on the Cape, and driving for the Red Cross.”
The Playhouse was back in business in 1946 as Lawrence finished the Broadway production of Pygmalion and then continued her role as Eliza Doolittle on stage in Dennis, this time with John Williams as Henry Higgins. As The Barnstable Patriot reported in a late summer article recapping a season that had premiered on July 1, “Under the direction of Richard Aldrich, The Cape Playhouse reopened this summer for the first time in four years, and before the first production, ‘Pygmalion,’ starring Gertrude Lawrence, had given its first performance, not only had the entire week’s engagement been sold out, without even standing-room-only tickets available, but the second week’s bill, Gregory Peck in ‘Playboy of the Western World,’ was a sell-out as well.”
Later that same summer, Lawrence surprised Playhouse audiences when—unannounced and uncredited in the playbill—she appeared under the name of Alexandra Dagmar in the program and brought her gravitas to the relatively small role of Crystal Wetherby for the entire week’s run of The Man in Possession, starring Gene Raymond. According to the August 29 Barnstable Patriot, “Miss Lawrence was born Gertrude Alexandra Dagmar Lawrence Klasen, in London, her father’s name was Klasen, but he called himself Lawrence on the stage. Lawrence wanted to make one more appearance before the summer season ended, but wished to do it without a star’s fanfare.” At least some in the audience on opening night recognized Lawrence’s voice offstage as she delivered her opening lines before she actually entered in Act II and realized immediately that they were about to see a surprise performance by Cape Cod’s adopted Broadway legend.
And in a front-page story that summer on June 28 previewing the 1946 season, The Register reported that July 4th would be “a fourfold holiday for Richard Aldrich’s Cape Playhouse, at Dennis on Cape Cod. Besides the national Independence Day, The Playhouse, long renowned as ‘America’s Most Famous Summer Theatre,’ will celebrate on that day its 20th anniversary year, the birthday of Gertrude Lawrence, and the sixth anniversary of her wedding to Richard Aldrich.”
Lawrence returned to The Playhouse stage in 1947 in a potentially pre-Broadway engagement produced by Aldrich of W. P. Lipscomb’s The Lady Maria, about the secret marriage of King George III’s son Prince George to the widow Maria Fitzherbert in a story that centers around the Prince of Wales ultimately having to give up his wife in order to ascend to the throne of England upon his father’s passing. Despite the star power of Lawrence and the intrigue of the plot, this first production of The Lady Maria closed after its tryout and did not move to New York.
In July 1948, Lawrence charmed Playhouse audiences with the “special brilliance of her widely acclaimed talents” by adding “her own stamp of style” to the character Olivia Brown in Terrence Rattigan’s comedy O Mistress Mine after its recent Broadway success, according to a review in the July 24 Register. Lawrence was especially lauded for her “telling gestures and superb bits of pantomime” as the comedy provided a fine vehicle for “Lawrence’s teasing moods and quicksilver expressions.”
Lawrence performed for the penultimate time on The Playhouse stage in late Summer 1949, this time in that du Maurier play, September Tide, about a man who falls in love with his mother-in-law. As noted in an August 26 Register review, Lawrence “plays the part of Stella Martyn, the mother, a widow of great charm; a vague helpless-without-her-glasses lavender-and-old-lacey … sort of character…. Miss Lawrence gets everything out of the part, and her stage presence and personality are nothing short of tremendous. It is her play.”
The final time that Lawrence graced The Playhouse stage was in Summer 1950, as she starred as Beatrice (Bumble) Pelham opposite Dennis King in Traveller’s Joy, Arthur Macrea’s 1948 comedy about English families dealing with post-World-War-II currency restrictions while on a trip to Stockholm, Sweden. Like The Lady Maria, this was another production brought to The Playhouse in anticipation of a possible Broadway run, but the show did not continue on to New York. It did, however, subsequently play The Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut, where Lawrence was photographed in a group shot with some of the cast and crew there, including apprentice Stephen Sondheim.
As it turned out, Hollywood came calling for Lawrence in 1949 when she was cast over possible choices Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Ethel Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead as faded Southern belle Amanda Wingfield in the movie version of Tennessee Williams’s classic 1944 stageplay, The Glass Menagerie. She joined a star-studded cast in that film, released the following year, that included Arthur Kennedy as Tom Wingfield, Jane Wyman as Laura Wingfield, and a young Kirk Douglas as Jim the Gentleman Caller. In the scene in which Laura helps Tom get into bed, the song “Someone to Watch Over Me” plays in the background in homage to Lawrence’s 1926 hit record. Variety noted that the project “that skyrocketed Tennessee Williams to the topmost dramatist brackets has been beautifully celluloided by Warners [Warner Brothers Pictures]. Arty it is, unquestionably, but in a down-to-earth style that results in complete audience identification.”
And then it was back to Broadway for the last and most memorable role of Lawrence’s career. The Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical The King and I—based on Margaret Landon’s 1944 semi-fictionalized biographical novel Anna and the King of Siam—was the final play written specifically as a star vehicle for Lawrence, as she portrayed the British governess to the children of King Mongkut, played by Yul Brynner.
The musical opened on March 29, 1951, at the Saint James Theatre, and Lawrence dazzled New York audiences as Anna Leonowens night after night and matinee after matinee—so much so that she would win the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical the following year, with The King and I taking top honors in four other categories: for Best Musical, for Best Featured Actor in a Musical (Brynner), for Best Costume Design (for Irene Sharaff), and for Best Scenic Design (for Jo Mielziner, who in 1930 had overseen the creation and installation of the Rockwell Kent mural on the ceiling of The Cape Cinema adjacent to The Playhouse).
In Summer 1952, Lawrence was granted a six-week break from The King and I, with actress Celeste Holm—already famous for originating the role of Ado Annie in Oklahoma! and for her screen success alongside Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s Agreement—taking over the role as Anna. In a letter dated June 9 to Percy Williams, then Cape Playhouse Press Representative, Lawrence writes, “For weeks I have been wondering where to go for my six weeks’ rest after a year and a half in Siam!”
“I wanted complete privacy – wonderful climate – no insects – unrestricted bathing ‘sans culottes’ – old country clothes – pleasant surroundings – somewhere I could get to without long travel and no frightening hotel bills and the resultant endless tipping.”
Would it be Bermuda? Jamaica? Honolulu? Naples, Florida? In truth, she realizes, “I found that what I was looking for was something that already belonged to me. So, I am coming to the Cape.”
Lawrence continues, “But – for two or three weeks, Pete [her nickname for Percy], I am going into complete seclusion. I am desperately tired, and Rodgers and Hammerstein are afraid lest I get involved in the various summer theatre activities and thus dissipate the short six weeks which I need and which will pass all too quickly. So—please put off any plans for pictures, etc. until I give you the green light, will you?”
After that summer hiatus at The Berries in East Dennis amid her hopes of rejuvenating herself from being “desperately tired,” Lawrence returned to the role of Anna in The King and I on August 11. Five days later, she fainted backstage following a matinee, and after a brief stay at home and her still not feeling well, she was admitted to nearby New York Hospital. She was originally diagnosed with hepatitis, but as time went by without improvement, some of her doctors feared it might be cancer.
On September 6, the day of a planned exploratory surgery, Lawrence lost consciousness and died shortly thereafter. The autopsy showed that she had indeed been ravaged by undiagnosed liver and abdominal cancer.
The New York Times reported that 5000 people assembled at the intersection of East 55th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan outside Lawrence’s funeral on September 9. As he passed through the throng and entered the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, Aldrich remembers in his biography of Lawrence that “More than ever, I was aware of Gertrude’s extraordinary human appeal—that divine spark of vitality, warmth, zest for life—that brought a glow to all who stood in her presence. It was more than a theatrical gift; it was the essence of her whole being. And at that moment, it was a tangible force in the heart of busy Manhattan, bringing a hush to the morning traffic and forging a link among thousands of complete strangers.”
Inside, Richard Rodgers played the organ and Oscar Hammerstein gave the eulogy in a service attended by 1800 friends, family, and admirers, including Yul Brynner, Phil Silvers, Moss Hart, Kitty Carlisle, and Marlene Dietrich, among other luminaries of stage and screen. Tributes inside the church included a floral arrangement from students and faculty at Yarmouth High School because Lawrence and Aldrich had endowed prizes at the school—given each year for a decade—to “the senior girl and senior boy who excelled in dramatics during their school career,” according to the September 12, 1952 Register.
In a fitting token of respect for her final Broadway role, Lawrence was interred in the champagne-colored gown she had worn for the “Shall We Dance?” sequence in Act II of The King and I.
“And on a hill in Korea, a unit of British soldiers held their own service,” writes Marcia Monbleau in that 1991 book on Cape Playhouse history. A chaplain told the troops there that “The news has flashed across the world, men. Miss Gertrude Lawrence has passed away…. I have a feeling that the moon and sun will have to squeeze over a bit to make room for a star like our Gertie.” In the stunned silence that followed, according to Monbleau, a soldier somewhere in the ranks began to sing “Someone to Watch Over Me,” the signature song Lawrence had made famous in 1926.
To get a sense of the magnitude of Lawrence’s career, consider this: the custom of dimming the marquee lights in front of all Broadway theatres on the death of an exceptional star of the New York stage—still very much an important tradition that acknowledges the careers of great actresses and actors even to this day—took place for the first time ever with the passing of Gertrude Lawrence, as New York theatres responded in unison in her honor on the night of her funeral. The lights were also dimmed in Lawrence’s memory in London’s West End.
Lawrence was buried in the Aldrich family plot at Lakeview Cemetery in Upton, Massachusetts, and although her grave marker gives her birth year as 1900, she was actually born two years earlier. In recognition of Lawrence’s impact on America’s most famous summer theatre, The Cape Playhouse maintains The Gertrude Lawrence Dressing Room—found backstage and to the right from the audience’s perspective—once used by Lawrence herself and now often assigned to the leading actress in each Playhouse production. By tradition, one or more blue hydrangeas are placed in the Gertrude Lawrence Dressing Room on the opening night of each show… and refreshed as necessary throughout the run.
Nearby, the stage inside Dennis Union Church—found in an addition built mostly with donations in Lawrence’s memory given in late 1952 to the house of worship she sometimes attended—is named The Gertrude Lawrence Stage and is now the home for Eventide Theatre Company. On the 50th anniversary of Lawrence’s passing in late summer 2002, Eventide staged Natalie Ross Miller’s original two-act play “G,” a tribute to Lawrence, with Oriana Camish as young Gertrude and Celeste Howe as the legend in later years.
And in the 1968 film Star!, Julie Andrews—fresh off her mid-1960s successes in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music—portrayed Gertrude Lawrence in a nearly-three-hour big-screen biopic, with Richard Crenna as Richard Aldrich and Daniel Massey as Noel Coward. The Hollywood musical extravaganza included scenes filmed on location at The Cape Playhouse and at the nearby historic home where Lawrence and Aldrich had married in 1940. Star! was nominated for eight Academy Awards, with Massey winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
So the enigma remains: how is it possible that an actress of such fame and significance in her lifetime as Lawrence is not better remembered today? Biographer Sheridan Morley in 1981 writes—and this analysis is likely correct—that it is because Lawrence “died before television had begun to immortalize its artists on tape, before radio shows were regularly recorded, and though she made half a dozen films, her appearances in them … give no clear indication of a radiance which could hold theatre audiences spellbound.”
Without question, Lawrence’s legacy deserves to be much better remembered in modern times for her dazzling portrayals and overall body of work across nearly three decades of stage successes on Broadway and in London’s West End … and to be remembered even more so by present-day Cape theatre-goers as perhaps The Playhouse’s greatest actress, cast in ten plays that captivated discerning Dennis summer audiences between 1939 and 1950. Let Sir Laurence Olivier—the actor for whom London’s annual theatre awards have been named since 1984 and her fellow cast member in that original 1930 production of Private Lives—have the last word here for his reflection on Gertrude Lawrence’s passing: “She was a blazing great star, and we shall never see another quite like her.”
For a 51-second clip of Julie Andrews as Gertrude Lawrence and Richard Crenna as Richard Aldrich during the filming of Star! at The Cape Playhouse, click the image below:
And here is Gertrude Lawrence with Stephen Sondheim (and Richard’s Rodger’s daughter Mary, also an apprentice) during that Westport Country Playhouse production of “Traveler’s [sic] Joy”:
