page_title: Edwin Booth
section_title: Dramatizations
hierarchical_section_title: Edwin Booth / Dramatizations
caption_attribution_description: English: Oliver Ingraham Lay - Edwin Booth as Hamlet Русский: Портрет Эдвина Бута работы Оливера Лэя
context_page_description: Edwin Thomas Booth was an American actor who toured throughout the United States and the major capitals of Europe, performing Shakespearean plays. In 1869, he founded Booth's Theatre in New York. Some theatrical historians consider him the greatest American actor, and the greatest Prince Hamlet, of the 19th century. His achievements are often overshadowed by his relationship with his younger brother, actor John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
context_section_description: A number of modern dramatizations have been made of Edwin Booth's life, on both stage and screen. One of the best known is the 1955 film Prince of Players written by Moss Hart, based loosely on the popular book of that name by Eleanor Ruggles. It was directed by Philip Dunne and stars Richard Burton and Raymond Massey as Edwin and Junius Brutus Booth, Sr., with Charles Bickford and Eva Le Gallienne, the latter of whom plays Gertrude to Burton's Hamlet. The film depicts events in Booth's life well before, and then surrounding, the assassination of Lincoln by Booth's younger brother.
  The opening scenes of Prince of Players are very similar to scenes in the earlier 1946 John Ford western My Darling Clementine. In that movie, the character of Granville Thorndyke (as acted by Alan Mowbray) is an obvious nod to Booth's father Junius, and the scenes portray essentially the same sequence where the great actor has to be retrieved from a bar and dragged back to the theatre where he is overdue to give a performance in front of a restless audience.
  The Brothers BOOTH!, by W. Stuart McDowell, which focuses on the relationships of the three Booth brothers leading up to the assassination of Lincoln, was workshopped and given a series of staged readings featuring David Strathairn, David Dukes, Angela Goethals, Maryann Plunkett, and Stephen Lang at the New Harmony Project, and at The Guthrie Theatre Lab in Minneapolis, and later presented in New York at the Players' Club, the Second Stage Theatre, and the Boston Athenaeum.  It was given its first fully staged professional production at the Bristol Riverside Theatre outside Philadelphia in 1992.  A second play by the same name, The Brothers Booth, which focuses on "the world of the 1860s theatre and its leading family" was written by Marshell Bradley and staged in New York at the Perry Street Theatre in 2004.
  Austin Pendleton's play, Booth, which depicts the early years of the brothers Edwin, Junius, and John Wilkes Booth and their father, was produced off Broadway at the York Theatre, starring Frank Langella as Junius Brutus Booth, Sr.  In a review, the play was called "a psychodrama about the legendary theatrical family of the 19th century" by The New York Times. Pendleton had adapted this version from his earlier work, Booth Is Back, produced at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1991-1992 season.
  The Tragedian, by playwright and actor Rodney Lee Rogers, is a one-man show about Booth that was produced by PURE Theatre of Charleston, South Carolina, in 2007. It was revived for inclusion in the Piccolo Spoleto Arts Festival in May and June 2008.
  A play by Luigi Creatore called Error of the Moon played off-Broadway on Theatre Row in New York City from August 13 to October 10, 2010. The play is a fictionalized account of Booth's life, hinging on the personal, professional, and political tensions between brothers Edwin and John Wilkes, leading up to the assassination of Lincoln.
  In 1959, the actor Robert McQueeney played Booth in the episode "The Man Who Loved Lincoln" on the ABC/Warner Brothers western television series, Colt .45, starring Wayde Preston as the fictitious undercover agent Christopher Colt, who in the story line is assigned to protect Booth from a death threat.
  In 1960, the anthology series television series Death Valley Days broadcast "His Brother's Keeper", in which Booth visits a small town after the Lincoln assassination, with one of the town's influential citizens trying to have him run out of town.
  In 1966, Martin Landau played Edwin Booth in the episode "This Stage of Fools" of the NBC western television series, Branded, starring Chuck Connors as Jason McCord. In the story line, McCord takes a job as the bodyguard to the actor Edwin Booth, brother of the presidential assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
  In 2013, Will Forte played Edwin Booth in the "Washington, D.C." episode of the Comedy Central's series, Drunk History, created by Derek Waters.
  In 2014, Edwin Booth was played by Gordon Tanner in The Pinkertons episode, "The Play's the Thing" (S1:E3). In the 
caption: Oliver Ingraham Lay: Edwin Booth as Hamlet,   1887
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