William Gillette - Playwright, Director, Actor

Playwright, Director, Actor

In 1881, while performing at Cincinnati, Gillette was hired as playwright, director and actor for $50 per week by two of the Frohman brothers, Gustave and Daniel. The first play he wrote and produced was The Professor. It debuted in the Madison Square Theater, lasting 151 performances, with a subsequent tour through many states (as far west as St. Louis, Missouri). That same year, he produced Esmeralda, written together with Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Early in his career, Gillette figured out that it would be in the triple role of playwright, director and actor that he would make the most money. Among the premier matinee idols of his day, he was described by Amy Leslie as "one of Gibson's notables materialized". Lewis Strang observed that "he rarely gesticulates, and his bodily movements often seem purposely slow and deliberate. His composure is absolute and his mental grasp of a situation is complete."

He could mesmerize an audience simply by standing motionless and in complete silence, or by indulging in any one of his grand gestures or subtle mannerisms. He did not gesture often but, when he did, it meant everything. He would steal a scene with a mere nod, a shrug, a glance, a twitching of the fingers, a compression of his lips, or a hardening of his face. Slight inflections in his voice spoke wonders. "Occasionally", Georg Schuttler pointed out, "when it was least expected, he gestured or moved his body so quickly that the speed of the action was compared to the swift opening and closing of a camera’s shutter."

S. E. Dahlinger, leading expert on the play Sherlock Holmes, summed him up: "Without seeming to raise his voice or ever to force an emotion, he could be thrilling without bombast or infinitely touching without descending to sentimentality. One of his greatest strengths as an actor was the ability to say nothing at all on the stage, relying instead on an involved, inner contemplation of an emotional or comic crisis to hold the audience silent, waiting for the moment when he would speak again."

He was an unemotional actor, unable to emote, even in love scenes, about which Montrose Moses commented, "he made appeal through the sentiment of situation, through the exquisite sensitiveness of outward detail, rather than through romantic attitude and heart fervor."

Ward Morehouse described Gillette's style as "dry, crisp, metallic, almost shrill." Gretchen Finletter recalled that it was "a dry, almost monotonous voice admirably suited to the great Holmes". The Times noted in 1937 that, "it would be hard to convince that portion of the American public that knew and followed him that any better actor had ever trod the American stage ... It would be conservative to say that Mr. Gillette was the most successful of all American actors."

He had a heightened sense of the dramatic, and his two most riveting scenes – the hospital scene in Held by the Enemy and the Telegraph Office scene in Secret Service – are still considered to be among the most dramatic scenes in the history of the American theater.

Gillette treated both sides of the American Civil War, North and South, equally, bestowing integrity, loyalty and honor on both, even as he made a spy each play's sympathetic hero. Yet, what set Gillette apart from all the rest was not simply his reliance on realism, his imperturbable naturalistic acting, or his superior sense of the dramatic. At a time when American art – of all kinds – was held by the British in very low esteem, he "was also a pioneer in making American drama ‘American’, rejecting what had been up until that time a pervasive European influence on American theater."