Biography
Cowl was born as Grace Bailey in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were Charles A. Bailey and Grace Avery. She attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York.
She made her Broadway debut in New York City in Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall in 1903, the play opened on the night of her twentieth birthday. Her first leading role was Fanny Perry in 1909 in Leo Ditrichstein's Is Matrimony a Failure?, produced by David Belasco, and then she played stock. This was followed by The Gamblers(1910), her first great success, and by Within the Law(1912), Common Clay, and other successes (New International Encyclopedia). She was known for her interpretation of Shakespearean roles, playing Juliet, Cleopatra and Viola on Broadway. She made Broadway history by playing Juliet over 1000 consecutive performances in 1923; critic George Jean Nathan declared her "not ... the best Juliet that I have seen, but she is by all odds the most charming". Cowl's affecting performances led her to be described as having a "voice with a tear." Biographer Charles Higham admired Cowl's "marvelous bovine eyes and exquisite genteel catch in the voice ..."
In 1930 Cowl appeared with a young Katharine Hepburn in the Broadway production of Benn W. Levy's play Art and Mrs. Bottle, and in 1934 she created the role of Lael Wyngate in S. N. Behrman's Rain from Heaven opposite actor John Halliday. Noting the challenges posed by Behrman's heightened dialogue, critic Gilbert Gabriel noted approvingly that their scenes together were "models of aristocratic parlando." She also starred in Noël Coward's Easy Virtue.
Cowl was the lead in two silent films, Garden of Lies (1915) and The Spreading Dawn (1917). Then, after taking nearly 30 years off from films, she returned for several supporting roles in the 1940s. Her final film was Payment on Demand (1951) with Bette Davis.
Read more about this topic: Jane Cowl
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