Unveiling the First Famous American Actors: Origins of Stardom
Imagine this: it’s 2005, New York City. A theatre enthusiast stands outside after seeing David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, clutching a poster and marker. Having read the play countless times and seen the film adaptation repeatedly, this isn’t typical behaviour. Usually, such a fan maintains a composed appreciation for great performances. But tonight is different. Liev Schreiber, arguably the finest actor of his generation, emerges. He played Richard Roma, the role immortalized by Al Pacino on film. As Schreiber signs the poster, the fan, intending a calm compliment like, “Excellent work, sir. You are the best actor of our generation,” instead blurts out, “Thank you so much! I will never hear Al Pacino in my head again when I’m teaching this play!” The actor, slightly taken aback, smiles, murmurs a “Thank you,” and makes a swift exit from the clearly overwhelmed admirer.
Reflecting on this loss of composure during the subway ride home, the fan—a scholar of early American theatre—began to ponder this encounter through a historical lens. What would a similar interaction have been like in eighteenth-century New York? How did actors and their admirers relate back then? Colonial New York might not immediately spring to mind as an arts destination, yet Manhattan’s theatres have drawn audiences for over two centuries. Royall Tyler, the Boston lawyer who penned The Contrast, the first successful play by an American author in the independent U.S., was one such visitor. However, the relationship between performers and fans was vastly different. Liev Schreiber, though classically trained for the stage, gained initial recognition through the globally dominant American film industry. His image was widely circulated long before the fan saw him perform live. Reviews in established publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker shaped expectations. The entire experience—online tickets, an Amtrak journey, Playbill magazines—conformed to a modern Broadway tourism model, driven by a culture industry selling experiences from multiplex cinemas to high-priced theatre seats. Surely, nothing like that star-struck moment could have happened in the eighteenth century. Or could it? Exploring the history reveals the fascinating origins of fame for The Most Famous American Actors, long before Hollywood existed.
Early Sparks: Fandom and Acting in Colonial America
While the landscape was different, some elements of modern celebrity and fandom were already budding in early American theatre. Fan intensity was certainly present, even though acting wasn’t a highly respected profession for most eighteenth-century Americans. Admirers penned poems praising emerging actresses. Rival critics exchanged barbs in newspaper columns supporting their preferred performers. Aspiring gentlemen like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were avid theatre-goers. Even John Adams, initially confined to theatre-less Massachusetts, developed a taste for it, participating in amateur readings at Harvard before embracing theatre during his political career. Reading, attending, and performing in amateur theatricals were ingrained habits for a segment of early American society.
The Challenge of Visibility: Images and Ensemble Theatre
The world of early American actors also holds glimmers of familiarity. A nascent celebrity culture began forming through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, offering various paths to fame. Playwrights occasionally tailored roles for specific actors. Performers sometimes commissioned starring vehicles to boost their careers. Ambitious actors employed strategies like specializing in popular character types (“lines”), aligning themselves with dominant gender norms, or emphasizing their national identity—European or American. As technology advanced through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the perceived gap between actor and fan narrowed. Consequently, actors, rather than plays, started dominating the American stage. Actress Olive Logan noted in the late nineteenth century, “With all their love for theatrical amusements, I have no hesitation in saying that the Americans care much more for actors than for the merits of the play itself.”
Logan’s observation resonates with our own celebrity-focused culture. However, both her era and ours differ significantly from the early American theatre regarding the ubiquitous visual presence we associate with contemporary fame. In late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain, fame was highly visual, transformed by innovations like mezzotint that made images cheaper to produce. But in North America, circulating performers’ images was much harder. Critic Trish Loughran notes that near the end of the colonial period, only King George III possessed instantly recognizable features across the colonies, until joined later by George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Even Washington’s image took time to become widespread, as Wendy Wick Reaves documented: an engraving of the British poet John Dryden from a 1773 almanac was repurposed as Sam Adams in 1777, and then as Washington in 1799. Instant, universal visual recognition wasn’t a prerequisite for celebrity in the early republic, even for the most depicted figures.
This lack of immediate visual recognition created vastly different conditions for actors compared to today’s stars. Given the poor image circulation, celebrity actors were far less common in the colonial and early republican periods than in Olive Logan’s time, let alone ours. Furthermore, early theatres often operated under ensemble conditions, where marketing individual stars was less prevalent than it became later. As the theatre industry consolidated and image reproduction technology improved in the nineteenth century, an apparatus for developing celebrity performers, akin to the Hollywood star factory, started to emerge. But in the pioneering phase, celebrity was rarer and more speculative. Actors striving for fame then labored in an entrepreneurial environment more like gold prospecting than modern industrial production.
Laying the Foundation: Professional Theatre Takes Root
The precise start of professional theatre in British North America is somewhat hazy. The first likely commercial performances occurred around 1749-1750, led by Murray and Kean. In 1752, Lewis Hallam Sr.’s London Company of Comedians arrived in Williamsburg, initiating what became the most successful pre-revolutionary troupe. These British actors entered largely unknown territory. The colonial market was untested, no city could support a permanent company, necessitating constant travel. Unlike imported goods like tea, theatre faced religious opposition, particularly from Presbyterian and Quaker communities in New York and Philadelphia. Puritan New England resisted professional theatre until after the Revolution. Additionally, actors demanded payment in specie (hard currency) but moved on after a few weeks or months, causing local merchants to sometimes oppose theatrical seasons, fearing a drain on local money and a bad influence on apprentices.
Hardships on the Road: Life of an Early Actor
Life for actors in troupes like the London Company (later renamed the American Company under David Douglass) was often arduous. They were nomads, traveling by cart, foot, or ship along the Atlantic coast and occasionally to the West Indies. (Eventually, they established a circuit from New York to Charleston.) Eighteenth-century companies typically used a “share” system: performers received a portion of profits, if any, instead of wages. Established members got “benefit nights,” taking the house’s net profits, but this income was unreliable. Roles were assigned based on hierarchical “lines of business” (e.g., tragic lead, low comedian). Actors fiercely protected their parts in popular plays, often treated as company property. The repertory system added complexity, requiring troupes like the American Company to perform a different play almost nightly.
Given these difficulties, individual actors rarely achieved widespread fame. Marketing master David Douglass focused on selling his company’s respectability to influential men in new cities, often leveraging his Masonic connections. Wealthy men seeking cultural parity with metropolitan Britons were crucial for gaining performance licenses and selling profitable box seats. (Working-class men and prostitutes also attended, usually confined to the upper gallery.) Ironically, the same prosperous class Douglass courted supported the Continental Congress’s 1775 ban on theatrical performances, forcing the actors to flee again to the Caribbean.
A New Era: The Rise of the Star System After the Revolution
The professional theatre’s exile lasted nearly a decade. Activity resumed tentatively in 1783 (Thomas Wall’s troupe in Baltimore) and more substantially in 1784 when Lewis Hallam Jr. brought parts of the American Company back north, eventually merging with John Henry’s group. They dubbed themselves the Old American Company, though most actors were still British-born. However, performer egos and a growing market (leading to salaried actors) soon caused divisions. This fragmentation in the early republic inadvertently helped launch the “star system” and a more recognizable celebrity culture. In 1792, Hallam and Henry recruited John Hodgkinson, who quickly maneuvered for more prominent roles, becoming a joint manager by 1794. That same year, popular comedian Thomas Wignell left the Old American Company with others to form a rival company in Philadelphia, spurring further competition.
Wignell’s recruiting trips to Britain brought talents like Anne Brunton Merry, James Fennell, and Thomas Abthorpe Cooper. Cooper, recruited in 1796, contracted with Hodgkinson and his new partner William Dunlap in New York by 1798. This “star” contract offered a higher salary than typical stock company members received and tied him to the managers, not the company, allowing him to negotiate performances elsewhere. Cooper spent his career as an itinerant star, moving between theatres, playing leading roles alongside local stock companies. The American shift towards the modern celebrity system was underway.
Expansion and Evolution: Theatre in the Early Republic
Meanwhile, professional theatre proliferated geographically and socially. Theaters opened in Boston, Providence, and westward locations like Pittsburgh and New Orleans. Female audiences, including working-class women, grew. New character types reflecting public demand for “American” content emerged—the stage Yankee, Irishman, Indian—and actors specializing in these roles became stars. The working-class gallery audience grew increasingly vocal post-revolution. Simultaneously, fashionable young gentlemen attendees like Washington Irving became more discerning critics, penning reviews and essays (like Irving’s “Jonathan Oldstyle” pieces for Salamagundi).
As theatre matured and spread, more talented performers left stock companies to become traveling stars. This trend peaked with Edwin Forrest, the first American theatrical celebrity in the modern sense.
Edwin Forrest: America’s First True Celebrity Actor
Edwin Forrest stands out as the first great native-born star of the American theatre and the first to commission plays specifically for himself. Debuting in 1820 and performing until 1872, Forrest became an icon, especially for working-class male audiences, embodying a kind of rugged American spirit akin to Andrew Jackson. Rising from humble Philadelphia origins, he gained fame playing Shakespearean leads and new democratic heroes like Jack Cade and Spartacus. Forrest was ubiquitous in his prime. Images—drawings, prints, photographs, even caricatures of his large head—circulated widely. Theatre managers had to negotiate terms with him. Possessing proprietary star roles and a fanbase seeing him as the epitome of American manhood, Forrest achieved unprecedented independence, far surpassing predecessors like Cooper.
Voices from the Stage: Perspectives of Logan and Rowson
Forrest represents the romantic image of the liberated star. However, the reality for other performers varied.
Olive Logan: A Pragmatic View of Fame
Olive Logan, daughter of a “Yankee” role specialist actor-manager, debuted young alongside stars like Forrest. After retiring briefly to study abroad, she returned in 1864 starring in Eveleen, a melodrama she wrote for herself. Logan admitted pursuing acting primarily because it was one of few professions open to women needing income. Retiring again in 1868, she became a journalist and women’s rights advocate. Her later comment about American audiences prioritizing actors over plays reflects both an actress’s memories and a critic’s sharp assessment.
Susanna Rowson: Navigating Gender and Politics Onstage
Susanna Rowson’s career highlights the particular challenges faced by actresses, especially concerning national identity and gender politics. Better known for novels like Charlotte Temple, Rowson, partly raised in Massachusetts but daughter of a British naval officer, returned to the U.S. driven by economic need. Performing with Wignell’s Philadelphia company in 1794, she wrote Slaves in Algiers, a play about American captives of Barbary pirates. The play sparked controversy. One character, Fetnah, expressed a desire for female equality. Rowson herself delivered the epilogue not as her character Olivia, but as the author, declaring humorously, “Women were born for universal sway, / Men to adore, be silent, and obey.” This provoked conservative editor William Cobbett, who attacked her as a proto-feminist tyrant and questioned her patriotism as a recent immigrant. Despite the brief storm, Rowson had a successful, though short, stage career before opening a school in 1797. Cobbett’s critique underscores the difficult cultural climate for performers, especially women, in the early republic.
Print, Portraits, and Localized Fame
The careers of Logan, Forrest, and Rowson unfolded amidst contemporary debates on national identity and gender, influencing public perception. Their rise also coincided with the expansion of American print culture—more newspapers, magazines, and printed plays. This print explosion fueled celebrity development by enabling professional and amateur critics to champion or critique actors and plays, finding their own voices in print. Starting in the 1780s, theatre fans found outlets in publications like The New York Daily Advertiser and specialized (though often short-lived) theatre journals like The Dramatic Censor (Philadelphia, 1805-06) and The Polyanthos (Boston, 1805-07, 1812-14). As Julie Stone Peters notes, eighteenth-century printed plays increasingly featured engravings of scenes or leading actors, a trend American printers adopted from London editions.
However, celebrity before the nineteenth-century star system’s triumph remained largely localized and less reliant on visual images than today. Images of performers rarely circulated as standalone prints. The American Antiquarian Society lists only six such prints before 1820. Few graphic depictions of the colonial stage exist. The most famous surviving image, however, vividly illustrates how perceptions of gender and nationality shaped early American theatre.
The Case of Nancy Hallam: Gender, Identity, and a Colonial Portrait
In 1770, while the American Company performed in Annapolis, renowned painter Charles Willson Peale created an oil portrait of Miss Nancy Hallam, niece of the company’s original leading lady. Peale depicted her as Fidele from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline—actually the disguised heroine Imogen, a classic eighteenth-century “breeches role.” Such roles showcased actresses’ charisma when adopting male traits and offered glimpses of their legs. Hallam’s costume in the painting is somewhat orientalist and reveals little leg, the posture slightly awkward. Yet, the performance captured in Peale’s work caught the eye of Annapolis critics, notably young metropolitan émigrés William Eddis (a colonial official) and Reverend Jonathan Boucher. Eddis penned a glowing review comparing Hallam favorably to London star Mrs. Cibber and praising the American Company. Boucher composed verses lauding both actress and portrait. Both appraisals appeared in The Maryland Gazette.
Oil painting 'Miss Hallam as Imogen' by Charles Willson Peale (1771), depicting the early American actress in a cross-dressed role, highlighting colonial theatre's link to British culture and gender performance.
These documents highlight colonial theatre’s role in maintaining a “British” cultural identity. Eddis’s review, though effusive (“Such delicacy of manner! Such classical strictness of expression!”), remains vague, suggesting only limited celebrity. Boucher’s poem praises her ability to capture Shakespeare’s spirit but says little specific about her appearance or performance. These young gentlemen fashioned their own celebrity fetish, finding their Britishness and connoisseurship reflected in Hallam’s trained body, amplified by the transgressive thrill of her cross-dressing. However, their printed reflections did little to convey the actual performance. Peale, using oil on canvas—the medium preferred by Annapolis elites for their own portraits—provided a more detailed but less reproducible representation, lending Hallam a degree of social standing unusual for a colonial actor.
Crafting an Image: Patriotism and Performance After the War
Ironically, Peale took the Hallam portrait to Philadelphia in 1775, the year the Revolution began and Congress closed the theatres. By the war’s end, Miss Hallam’s fame had likely faded. When actors like Hallam Jr. and Henry returned, they relied on rekindling pre-war memories to justify their presence. Unlike the first colonial actors who stressed the novelty of metropolitan culture, Hallam and Henry emphasized familiarity and a vague connection to the Revolution to market the remnants of the American Company against new rivals. A 1785 essay in The New-York Packet (likely planted by Henry) argued for granting playing permission to “an old company of players … who have a claim to remembrance for having lived amongst us,” rather than “British strangers” (though nearly all American Company actors were British-born). Henry stressed in a 1786 address that the company only left for Jamaica at Congress’s behest, claiming they refused earlier return offers out of duty to the United States. Pre-revolutionary fame and theatrical patriotism became marketing tools; Henry effectively “naturalized” his company. This linking of performers to major political events became common in public memory, as seen in a nineteenth-century manager’s inaccurate anecdote placing Mrs. Douglass’s 1773 death near a tavern later associated with the Constitutional Convention.
Mrs. Douglass herself was adept at image manipulation. After remarrying and returning from Jamaica post-French and Indian War, she played Lady Randolph in Douglas, likely emphasizing the epilogue’s appeal: “This night a Douglas your protection claims, / a Wife, a Mother, Pity’s softest names!” Such appeals to feminine vulnerability were often used to promote imported actresses. Consider Mrs. Kenna, brought from Dublin by the American Company in 1786. By 1787, New York critics were divided over her merits versus rivals Mrs. Morris and Mrs. Harper. Kenna’s fans praised her emotional power, while detractors noted her haughtiness. After being hissed for taking a comic role from the more experienced Mrs. Morris, Kenna’s supporters ran a printed appeal casting her as a victim: a blameless woman needing protection from cruel detractors trying to ruin her “in a strange country where she has not a friend or relation.” This manipulation of national and gender identities in print became increasingly typical of early republican fame-building.
Defining Manhood Onstage: The Curious Case of Thomas Wignell
Nationality and gender also framed discussions around male performers. Debates raged over whether characters like Bagatelle (a foppish French hairdresser in The Poor Soldier) insulted America’s French allies. Mrs. Harper’s performance in The Recruiting Officer, involving cross-dressing and performing military drills, sparked controversy in 1787, with one critic ironically suggesting a militia commission given her proficiency compared to politically appointed “beardless petites maîtres.” The public display of masculinity onstage proved surprisingly fragile for men busy reinventing themselves as republican patriarchs.
Darby and Jonathan: Wignell’s Unlikely Path to Fame
This defensiveness seems ironic considering Thomas Wignell, the greatest self-promoter before Cooper and the star system. Hailed as the “Atlas of the American theatre,” Wignell was a low comedian, playing mostly minor tragic roles post-revolution. His most significant lead was Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops To Conquer, demanding energetic, almost juvenile clowning. His fame primarily rested on two roles suggesting anything but reassuring masculinity.
Wignell was renowned as the cowardly Irishman Darby in O’Keefe’s ballad operas (The Poor Soldier, Love in A Camp). Darby is defined by military incompetence and fear, even falling asleep on duty. Wignell’s second iconic role was Jonathan, the original stage Yankee, in Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787). Jonathan, Colonel Manly’s homespun servant, is patriotic but uneducated and stayed home during the war. He serves more as a parody than a reflection of his cultured, heroic employer.
Self-Promotion in Print: Wignell Markets the ‘All-American Boy’
Jonathan spawned the long-lasting stage Yankee character type. His popularity stemmed from the interplay between role and performer. Wignell, short, stocky, with red hair, leveraged his distinct appearance. The Contrast‘s most famous scene features Jonathan mistakenly attending a play. There, Jonathan (played by Wignell) encounters “Darby Wag-All,” described as “a cute, round-faced little fellow with red hair, like me”—another famous Wignell character. Wignell simultaneously embodied the republican patriot Jonathan, his cowardly Irish counterpart Darby, and the metropolitan actor fooling Jonathan with stage illusions. His performances held a funhouse mirror to republican manhood ideals, yet audiences embraced his features and antics.
Tyler granted Wignell the copyright to The Contrast. When Wignell published it in Philadelphia in 1790 (a year before starting his own theatre there), he included a frontispiece engraving based on a drawing by William Dunlap. The engraving depicts the Act V climax: Manly confronts Dimple, Jonathan rushes in shouting “Do you want to kill the Colonel? I feel chock full of fight!” Though Jonathan is superfluous to the scene’s action and quickly dismissed by Manly, he dominates the image, seemingly redeeming his earlier failures. Wignell, promoting a play he popularized but which had limited performances, was clearly marketing himself as much as the play. The British-born comedian presented himself in print as the quintessential All-American Boy.
The journey towards celebrity for American actors was a complex evolution, rooted in European immigration and culminating in the global export of American performer images. While the early republican star system lacked the sheer volume and visual saturation of modern celebrity generated by today’s entertainment industry, the fundamental connections between performer, audience, and the construction of fame were clearly taking shape. The inherent risk and unpredictability of eighteenth-century theatre, akin to prospecting, echo in today’s big-budget productions. Perhaps most enduringly, whether in the 1780s or the 2020s, the encounter between audience and performer forges a sense of connection, a shared moment in the ever-evolving story of The Most Famous American Actors and the audiences captivated by them.
