William Gillette - Youth

Youth

The neighborhood where William Gillette was born, Nook Farm, Hartford, Connecticut, was a literary and intellectual center, with such residents as Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dudley Warner.

Gillette's father, Francis, was a former United States Senator and crusader for the abolition of slavery, public education, temperance and women's suffrage. His mother was Elisabeth Daggett Hooker, a descendant of the Reverend Thomas Hooker, the Puritan leader who founded the town of Hartford and either wrote or inspired the first written constitution in history to form a government. In the Gillette home, young Will grew up with his three brothers and a sister. Another sister, Mary, died as a small child.

His eldest brother, Frank Ashbell Gillette, went to California and died there in 1859 from consumption (tuberculosis). The next brother, Robert, joined the Union army and served in the Antietam campaign, was invalided home sick, recovered, and joined the Navy. Assigned to the U.S.S. Gettysburg, Robert took part in both assaults on Fort Fisher, but was killed the morning after the surrender of the fort when the powder magazine exploded. After his brother Edward moved to Iowa, and his sister Elisabeth married George Henry Warner, both in 1863, William was left as the only child in the household.

At the age of 20, he left Hartford to begin his apprenticeship as an actor. He briefly worked for a stock company in New Orleans and then returned to New England where, on Mark Twain's own recommendation, he debuted at the Globe Theater of Boston with Twain's stage-play The Gilded Age, in 1875. Afterward, he was a stock actor for six years through Boston, New York and the Midwest. He irregularly attended classes at a few institutions, although he never completed their programs. His father, Francis, who had held the strongest objections to the theater in general, offered the least resistance, and drove him to the train station, telling his son that he had driven two other sons to this same station and they had never returned; William was to make sure he was the exception. Francis supplied him with an allowance on which to subsist (his apprenticeship was without pay). When his father's health began to fail in 1878, William forsook the stage for more than a year to care for his father in his final illness. Upon his father's death, he and George Henry Warner were named executors of Francis' estate, and they, Elisabeth and Edward shared in the inheritance.