{{short description|Canadian/American stage actress (c.1846–1925)}} {{Use mdy dates|date=January 2021}} {{Infobox person <!-- See Template:Infobox actor for more --> | name = Clara Morris | image = Clara Morris by Rockwood.jpg | imagesize = | caption = Clara Morris by George G. Rockwood | birth_name = Clara Morrison | birth_date = 1846-1849 (disputed) | birth_place = Toronto, Canada West | death_place = New Canaan, Connecticut, United States | death_date= November 20, 1925 | occupation = Actor | spouse = {{Marriage|Frederick C. Harriott|November 30, 1874}} | signature = Signature of Clara Morris.png }}
'''Clara Morris''' (1846-9 – November 20, 1925) was a Canadian/American stage actress of the Victorian Era.
==Early life== Actress Clara Morris was born in Toronto, the eldest child of a bigamous marriage.<ref name="Smith College">{{Cite web|title=Collection: Clara Morris papers {{!}} Smith College Finding Aids|url=https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/resources/639|access-date=2020-08-06|website=findingaids.smith.edu}}{{Cc-notice|cc=by3}}</ref> Sources disagree on the year of her birth, writing it as any of the years from 1846 – 1849, inclusive.<ref name="Smith College" /><ref name=":1">{{Cite web|title=Collection: Diaries of Clara Morris, 1867-1924 {{!}} HOLLIS for|url=https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5524|access-date=2020-08-06|website=hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu}}</ref>
When she was three, her father, whose name was La Montagne, was exposed as a bigamist and her mother moved with Clara to Cleveland, where they adopted Clara's grandmother's name, Morrison. Young Clara received only scanty schooling. In circa 1860 she became a ballet girl in the resident company of the Cleveland Academy of Music, shortening her name to Morris at that time.<ref name="Smith College" /> At the Cleveland Academy of Music, Morris worked under the management of John A. Ellsler.<ref name="New York Clipper 1879-05-17">{{cite news |url=http://idnc.library.illinois.edu/cgi-bin/illinois?a=d&d=NYC18790517.2.3&srpos=10&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-sketch------- |format=PDF |title=Clara Morris |work=New York Clipper |publisher=New York Clipper |date=1879-05-17 |page=60 |accessdate=2018-01-02 }}</ref>
== Career ==
=== Stage === After nine years of training with that company she played a leading lady at Wood's Theatre in Cincinnati in 1869. She then appeared in Halifax, Nova Scotia for a summer, and with Joseph Jefferson in Louisville, before going to New York City in 1870. She made her New York debut in September in ''Man and Wife'', directed by Augustin Daly at his Fifth Avenue Theatre. The role had come to her by chance, but she made such an impression in it that Daly starred her in a series of highly emotional roles over the next three years in such plays as ''No Name'', ''Delmonico's'', ''L'Article 47'', ''Alixe'', ''Jezebel'', and ''Madeline Morel''.<ref name="Smith College" />
Mr. Daly engaged her to play in the Fifth Avenue Theatre, then located on West Twenty-fourth street; not as a leading act, but to fill whichever roles he deemed necessary. In the season of 1870–71, ''Man and Wife'' was in preparation for opening when the lead lady originally designated to play the role of Anne Silvester declined the part, and Ms. Morris stepped up to the position. On opening night, September 13, she made her debut in a major city, and ended up being recalled in an early scene in the play before the act was terminated - an unusual occurrence in the theatre at the time.
She left Daly in 1873 and in November of that year starred under A.M. Palmer's management in ''The Wicked World'' at the Union Square Theatre.<ref name="Smith College" />
In 1872, she made a sensation in ''L'Article 47''. Other successes followed and she became known as an actress distinguished for spontaneity and naturalness.
Over the next few years Morris had great successes in ''Camille'' in 1874, ''The New Leah'' in 1875, ''Miss Multon'' (an American version of a French version of "East Lynne"), her most popular role, in 1876, ''Jane Eyre'' in 1877, and ''The New Magdalen'' in 1882. She also toured extensively, especially in the 1880s, and everywhere mesmerized audiences with her emotional power. Although neither a great beauty nor a great artist, nor trained in elocution or stagecraft, she had an instinctive genius for portraying the impassioned and often suffering heroines of French melodrama.<ref name="Smith College" />
The passing of the vogue for that sort of theatre, together with her uncertain health, brought her career to a close in the 1890s.<ref name="Smith College" />
=== Writing and Speaking === In an article Morris wrote for the March 1904 issue of ''Metropolitan'' magazine, she recounted her encounter with Mark Twain. Morris included that the person who was intended to introduce her onstage had missed their train and couldn't attend the performance. Twain offered to introduce Morris instead, and the two walked to the stage, arm in arm. "Thus we made our entrance upon the stage," Morris wrote. "The applause was hearty and prolonged. I thought it was for him, and made no acknowledgment -- he thought it was for me and waited unresponsive. We looked reproachfully at each other -- then we both bowed. The audience understood and laughed happily."<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Morris |first=Clara |date=March 1904 |title=An Interview with Mark Twain |url=https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x030600870?urlappend=%3Bseq=94%3Bownerid=27021597769290186-108 |journal=Metropolitan Magazine |volume=19 |issue=6 |pages=869–872 |hdl=2027/uva.x030600870?urlappend=%3Bseq=94 |via=HathiTrust}}</ref>
In retirement in Riverdale, New York, she contributed articles on acting to various magazines, wrote a daily newspaper column for ten years, and published numerous books.<ref name="Smith College" />[[File:ClaraMorrisPlaque.jpg|thumb|Plaque marking the location of Clara Morris' house on the grounds of Cleveland Public Library]]
== Personal life == She married Frederick C. Harriott on November 30, 1874; Morris supported Harriott until he started acting with her, in 1892.<ref name=":1" />
== Later life and death == In 1910, Morris became blind, and experienced poverty. The house in which she had lived for 37 years was sold in 1914, and she moved to Whitestone, Long Island.
She died in New Canaan, Connecticut, on November 20, 1925, of a heart attack.<ref name="Smith College" /><ref>{{Cite web|title=The Cornell Daily Sun 21 November 1925 — The Cornell Daily Sun|url=https://cdsun.library.cornell.edu/?a=d&d=CDS19251121.2.7|access-date=2020-08-10|website=cdsun.library.cornell.edu}}</ref>
== Legacy == There is a plaque on the grounds of the Cleveland Public Library marking the location of Clara Morris' home when she was young. The plaque reads: "On this site, in her girlhood, lived Clara Morris. With limited opportunities she overcame privation and, in her twenties, was recognized as the leading emotional actress on the American stage."
The Clara Morris School, located at 1900 St. Clair Avenue NE, was part of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District until the building was torn down in 1968. Opened in 1868, the building was originally named the St. Clair School and held 16 rooms with "the windows, pointed in the Gothic manner."<ref> {{Citation | last = Boros | first = Ethel | title = Antique Lore | newspaper = The Plain Dealer | pages = 63 | date = July 13, 1968 | via = Newsbank | location = Cleveland, Ohio }}</ref>
== Roles == [[File:Clara-Morris-Camille-2.jpg|thumb|upright|In the title role in ''Camille'', 1874]]
Other notable roles of her career are:
* Anne Silvester in ''Man and Wife'' * Lucy Carter in ''Saratoga'' * Mme. D'Artigues in ''Jezebel'' * Tilburnia in ''The Critic'' * Magdalen Vanstone in ''No Name'' * Constance Sherman in ''Delmonico's, or Larks Up the Hudson'' * Miss Lulu Tibbetts in ''An Angel''
== Works == For some years after 1885, she devoted herself mainly to literary work, writing:<ref name="Smith College" />
* ''A Silent Singer'' (1899) * ''Little Jim Crow, and Other Stories of Children'' (1900) * ''Life on the Stage: My Personal Experiences and Recollections'' (1901) * ''A Pasteboard Crown'' (1902) * ''Stage Confidences'' (1902) * ''The Trouble Woman'' (1904) * ''The Life of a Star'' (1906) * ''Left in Charge'' (1907) * ''New East Lynne'' (1908) * ''A Strange Surprise'' (1910) * ''Dressing Room Receptions'' (1911)
In her book ''Life on the Stage: My Personal Experiences and Recollections'' she recounts her meeting with John Wilkes Booth the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.<ref>{{cite book|last=Morris|first=Clara|url=https://archive.org/details/lifeonstagemyper00inmorr|title=Life on the stage : my personal experiences and recollections|date=1901|publisher=McClure, Phillips & Co.|location=New York|pages=[https://archive.org/details/lifeonstagemyper00inmorr/page/97 97]-108}} </ref>
== In culture == Barbara Wallace Grossman published ''A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage'' in 2009, chronicling Morris' "importance as a feminist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Grossman|first=Barbara Wallace|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1CZ6CgAAQBAJ|title=A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage|date=2009-02-13|publisher=SIU Press|isbn=978-0-8093-2882-6|language=en}}</ref>
Oscar Wilde, during his visit to America in 1882, saw her perform in ''The New Magdalen.'' "Miss Morris is the greatest actress I ever saw," he later wrote. "If it be fair to form an opinion of her from her rendition of this one role, we have no such powerfully intense actress in England. She is a great artist, in my sense of the word, because all she does, all she says, in the matter of the doing and of the saying constantly evoke the imagination to supplement it. That is what I mean by art. She is a veritable genius." See Roy Morris, ''Declaring His Genius - Oscar Wilde in North America'' The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2013. pp. 39–40. She was "perhaps the world's first method actor," notes author Morris.
== References == {{reflist}}
* McKay and Wingate, ''Famous American Actors of To-Day'', (New York, 1896) *Matthews and Hutton, ''Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States'', (New York, 1886)
== External links == {{Commons category|Clara Morris}} {{NSRW Poster|Morris, Clara|Clara Morris}} * [http://www.josephhaworth.com/clara_morris.htm Clara Morris biography] at the Joseph Haworth site. * [http://www.authorama.com/19th-century-actor-autobiographies-5.html 19th Century Actor Autobiographies] Ms. Morris recounts her meeting with John Wilkes Booth from ''Life on the Stage''. * {{Gutenberg author |id=4972| name=Clara Morris}} * {{Internet Archive author |sname=Clara Morris |sopt=t}} *[http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch00742 Diaries of Clara Morris, 1867-1924.] at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University * [https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/resources/639 Clara Morris papers] at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Special Collections * [https://cplorg.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16014coll24/id/2526/rec/55 Letters of Clara Morris] in the collections of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Morris, Clara}} Category:1840s births Category:1925 deaths Category:19th-century American actresses Category:American stage actresses Category:19th-century American novelists Category:20th-century American novelists Category:Actresses from Cleveland Category:Actresses from Toronto Category:American children's writers Category:American memoirists Category:Emigrants from pre-Confederation Ontario to the United States Category:American vaudeville performers Category:Canadian vaudeville performers Category:Writers from Toronto Category:American women memoirists Category:American women children's writers Category:20th-century American women novelists Category:20th-century American non-fiction writers Category:19th-century Canadian actresses Category:Canadian stage actresses Category:19th-century Canadian women writers Category:19th-century American women novelists