page_title: Katharine Cornell
section_title: Family and childhood
hierarchical_section_title: Katharine Cornell / Family and childhood
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of Katharine Cornell as a baby Caption reads as follows: The black-eyed little lady of the wicker wastebasket is, of course, Dr. Peter Cornell's handsome young daughter Katharine, who was posing for one of her earliest photographs. She seems to have been, even then, very much Katharine Cornell, with a firm grasp of the basket and the situation in general, with a surprising physical accuracy and singleness of purpose. She reached the inevitable gangling, awkward age a little later, but in all the violently reckless forms of activity in which she delighted, there was an odd, free-swinging grace—the same grace that has been the hallmark of all her acting from Little Women to The Wingless Victory. In the book publication of the Stage serial printing, the photograph is captioned, "At the age of 2".
context_page_description: Katharine Cornell was an American stage actress, writer, theater owner and producer. She was born in Berlin to American parents and raised in Buffalo, New York.
  Dubbed "The First Lady of the Theatre" by critic Alexander Woollcott, Cornell was the first performer to receive the Drama League Award, for Romeo and Juliet in 1935. Cornell is noted for her major Broadway roles in serious dramas, often directed by her husband, Guthrie McClintic. The couple formed C. & M.C. Productions, Inc., a company that gave them complete artistic freedom in choosing and producing plays. Their production company gave first or prominent Broadway roles to some of the more notable actors of the 20th century, including many British Shakespearean actors.
  Cornell is regarded as one of the great actresses of the American theatre. Her most famous role was that of English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the 1931 Broadway production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Other appearances on Broadway included in W. Somerset Maugham's The Letter, Sidney Howard's The Alien Corn, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Maxwell Anderson's The Wingless Victory, S. N.
context_section_description: Cornell was born into a prominent, wealthy Buffalo, New York society family. Her great-grandfather, Samuel Garretson Cornell, a descendant of pioneer ancestor Thomas Cornell, came to Buffalo in the 1850s, and founded Cornell Lead Works. One of his grandsons, Peter, married Alice Gardner Plimpton. The young couple lived in Berlin when Peter was studying medicine at the University of Berlin. Their first child, Katharine, was born there. Six months later, the family returned to Buffalo, where they lived at 174 Mariner Street. As a child, Katharine had a troubled relationship with her parents, due in part to her mother's alcoholism. She play-acted in her backyard with imaginary friends. Soon, she was performing in school pageants and plays, and she watched family productions in her grandfather's attic theater, still standing at 484 Delaware Avenue. Cornell played at the Buffalo Studio Club parlor theater, located at 508 Franklin Street. She loved athletics and was a runner-up for city championship at tennis, and an amateur swimming champion. She attended the University of Buffalo (later the State University of New York at Buffalo). In 1913, she joined The Garret Club, a woman's only private club in Buffalo, and participated in club theatricals.
  After Cornell had become famous, she often brought her productions to her native Buffalo. Although she never returned to Buffalo to live, her enthusiasm for the city and its inhabitants was well known. Biographer Tad Mosel wrote: "To show her affection for her hometown, she always walked slowly when she left her hotel, turning her head to smile on everyone on the street, missing no one, so they could feel close to her and be able to say when they got home that night, 'Katharine Cornell smiled directly at me.'" For the rest of her career, on opening Broadway nights, she was greeted backstage by family and friends from Buffalo. Many of her productions were performed at the Erlanger Theater on Delaware Avenue, across from the Statler Hotel. The Erlanger was demolished in 2007.
caption: Katharine Cornell at age two
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