Grayson Hall

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Grayson Hall (born September 18, 1922 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † August 7, 1985 in New York , New York ; actually Shirley Grossman ), also known under the name Shirley Grayson , was an American theater and film actress. Despite being in the 1950s when Lee Strasberg , the Method Acting studied, she developed a strong dislike for naturalistic representations later. She preferred to appear in avant-garde and comedic roles, often in plays by Saul Bellow , Jean Genet , John Guare or Pirandello . She received an Oscar nomination for John Huston's feature film The Night of the Iguana (1964) . A broad American television audience, she was also known through her participation in the series Dark Shadows (1967-1971).

Life

childhood and education

Grayson Hall was born Shirley H. Grossman (1923 or 1925, according to other data) in Philadelphia in 1922 . She was the only child of Jewish parents. Her mother Eleanor (birth name Witkins) was born in South Africa in 1902 and had worked as an actress in New York with the well-known Jewish theater family Adler. The Russian - Latvian family of her father, Joseph Grossman, emigrated from Latvia to the United States shortly after his birth in May 1896. Her father worked in various professions, including as a detective and bookmaker, and later ran a car repair business with his brothers. Shirley Grossman grew up as an only child in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Wynnewood. The marriage of the parents who married young was unhappy and they separated when Grossman was nine years old. She then lived with her mother, with whom she often moved and stayed with relatives. The relationship with the father should remain tense throughout his life.

The imaginative child, who grew up in isolation and had ambitions to act from an early age, attended various elementary schools. From 1937 to 1941 Grossman was a student at Simon Gratz High School , which among other things offered a theater program. She later moved to Temple University , where she was supposed to enroll in English, French and European history. Although she received good grades, when she was 15 she often stayed away from class so that she could, according to her own account, attend her first auditions in New York. At that time, she needed a brace to straighten out her bad posture. At Temple University, Grossman said he joined the Templayers , the theater group there.

First stage engagements in New York

After graduating from high school in 1941, Grossman joined her hometown Neighborhood Players , which later included such well-known artists as Arthur Penn and David Goodis . In June of the same year she took on an extra role in a production of the theatrical comedy Man on Volcano . In the late summer of 1941, Grossman enrolled at Cornell University in New York for the subjects of 19th century poetry, Victorian poetry, sociology and drama. After only one summer semester, she moved back to Temple University, where she studied until 1942. In the summer of 1942 she took part in the summer theater on Long Island as an acting student under the stage name Shirley Grayson . She worked in various productions at the Sayville Playhouse , where Marlon Brando and James Dean were also working at the time. She made her first written stage appearance in New York with the part of Cleo in a production of Kenyon Nicholson's The Barker on July 24, 1942. Both with the role of the worn-out lady and with three other summer theater pieces her first praise from the critics was granted .

After working at the Sayville Playhouse , Shirley Grayson had two radio engagements until 1952 (1945 and 1949) and she appeared in productions at the Hedgerow Theater near Philadelphia. During this time she was able to resist the urge of her mother, who, worried for her own financial security, wanted to couple her daughter with a wealthy Jewish husband. From 1946 to 1949, she married her former acting colleague Ted Brooks (real name Bradbart), with whom she lived for a while in Los Angeles and the writer David Goodis was one of her mutual friends. In California, which she was reluctant to speak of in later years, she began to suffer from asthma . Together with their cigarette consumption, this should lead to persistent breathing problems for their entire life. Grayson failed to get feature film roles in California, although she claims to have been considered for the lead role of Sister Parker alongside Ronald Reagan in Vincent Sherman's war film Counted Hours . But this went to the young Patricia Neal .

Grayson later moved to New York, where she shared an apartment with a colleague. She continued to attend auditions and in 1952 married former actor Sam Hall , who wrote screenplays for television series. Together they hosted dinner parties for befriended actors and writers, including Jay Presson Allen and Gaby Rodgers . Her husband's contacts, a former Yale graduate , and the friendships she made over dinner should be useful for future assignments. According to Sam Hall, it was during this time, when method acting was very important, that Grayson began to look seriously at her acting training. Although she would later reject the method and her demeanor was compared to Tallulah Bankhead or Gertrude Lawrence by her colleagues , she studied with Lee Strasberg , Robert Lewis and the Laughton's Shakespeare Group over the next few years . She also took voice lessons from David Craig, husband of actress Nancy Walker . In 1953, Grayson made her off-Broadway debut as Ann Whitefield in a production of George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman at the Equity Library Theater . The theater company was founded by Sam Jaffe and George Freedly to introduce young and unknown actors in the New York theater world to managers and agents. To prepare for her role, Grayson had taken lessons from Constance Collier . Grayson remained close friends with the British actress, who would also have a strong influence on her later career.

1955 followed the role of a provocative actress in José Quintero's highly acclaimed production of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde , for which Grayson received very good reviews. The piece with Katharine Ross and Susan Oliver brought it to over 130 performances from June to November 1955. Grayson now had her own agent who got her roles in two television plays. A year later she was able to build on this success with Tyrone Guthrie's Revival Six Characters in Search of an Author after Luigi Pirandello , in which she had a small role and made her Broadway debut. The British director, like Grayson later, had an aversion to naturalistic representations.

In 1958, Grayson and Hall moved into a large apartment in downtown New York, furnished it with expensive antiques, and where they would spend the next thirty years. After the pregnancy and the birth of their son, she appeared in an episode of the television series United States Steel Hour in 1959 . At the same time she changed her name from Shirley Grayson to Grayson Hall. Her husband used to address the actress by her stage name Grayson . Due to a misunderstanding, she accidentally received the name Grayson Hall, which she was to use from the early 1960s, when she was preparing a contract. The name change will be made officially on February 5, 1960, when a renewed collaboration with José Quintero at the Jean Genet- -Stück The Balcony followed, in which she gave the Irma 18 months off-Broadway. In the summer of 1961, Grayson Hall received fabulous reviews in Philadelphia for her appearance in the one-person play The Human Voice based on Jean Cocteau at the Hedgerow Theater.

First film offers and Oscar nomination

Parallel to her work at the theater, the still insecure actress ( "I think I have to work and keep working to find out who I am so that I can communicate with an audience. This is the artist's first duty ..." , 1960) in before she made her cinema debut in 1961 with a small role as a café owner in Everett Chambers' drama Run Across the River , then still under the name Shirley Grayson. Chambers had worked as a casting director at the Philco Playhouse , where Hall's husband was employed. A year later she played a bigger role as the urbane, lesbian nightclub owner in Jerald Intrators Satan in High Heels (1962). The participation in the exploitation film , in which Meg Myles was seen in the lead role of a stripper, should deny Grayson in later years. Another New York film production, The Parisienne and the Prudes (1964) by Robert J. Gurney Jr., could not be released in the US.

Hall's breakthrough as a film actress paved the way in 1964 when she appeared in John Huston's The Night of the Iguana . The film adaptation of the successful Broadway play by Tennessee Williams is about a group of stranded characters (played by Richard Burton , Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr, among others ) in Mexico and sometimes deviates drastically from the literary model. Hall slipped into the role of a young, latent homosexual teacher who tries to vehemently protect the niece (played by Sue Lyon ) in her care from advances in men. Frances Sternhagen , Marian Winters , Nancy Marchand , Rosemary Murphy and Lee Grant , among others , were interested in the role . John Huston had attested Hall qualities "a young Hepburn " and then offered her the part after auditions in New York.

The film became a box office success after the filming, which Richard Burton's future wife Elizabeth Taylor attended, attracted a host of reporters from all over the world to the then unknown Mexican location of Puerto Vallarta . Critics praised the cast around Burton, Gardner, Lyon and Kerr in particular, but also Hall's interpretation of the Judith Fellowes, whose role had been expanded more than the play. Bosley Crowther ( The New York Times ) praised Hall's acting performance as "incredibly impetuous" , while the Los Angeles Times her supporting role alongside those of Edith Evans ( The House in the Chalk Garden ), Agnes Moorehead ( lullaby for a corpse ), Dolores del Río ( Cheyenne ) and Louise Latham ( Marnie ) were among the best of the 1964 cinema year. In 1965 Hall was nominated for the Oscar and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress, but was left behind against Lilja Kedrowa ( Alexis Sorbas ) and Agnes Moorehead.

Hall, who was enthusiastic about her colleague Kim Stanley , could not build on the success of The Night of the Iguana in the course of her film career . Despite the Oscar nomination, she was not offered more film roles than before. The self-critical artist also refused to move from New York to Los Angeles. In 1965, she appeared as a kidnapped bank clerk in the Disney film Alles für den Katz . A year later she traveled to Paris , where she played a role in William Klein's fashion satire Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966) took over. Hall was remembered by a wide audience through appearances in over 400 episodes of the popular and still cultically revered American television series Dark Shadows , which was broadcast on ABC television from 1967 to 1971 , and the two film adaptations ( Castle of the Vampires , 1970; The Castle of the Lost Seelen , 1971) followed. In later episodes, the series focused on a 175-year-old vampire (played by Jonathan Frid ) who comes to life in a small fishing village on the US east coast. Hall played various roles on the series, including that of Dr. Julia Hoffman trying to treat the vampire.

In the 1970s, Hall appeared more frequently on American television and made guest appearances on series such as Kojak - Use in Manhattan (1974) and recurring roles in the soap operas All My Children (1973) and Love, Lie, Passion (1982). She played regularly off-Broadway roles and appeared in a few Broadway productions, including as the mysterious "Lady in Gray (The Fly)" in the musical revival Happy End (1977) or as Serafima alongside Derek Jacobi in the comedy The Suicide (1980). However, her breakthrough as a theater actress was denied her life. "Grayson would have been a very, very big star, but [she] couldn't find the role in New York that would have catapulted her there," said American playwright John Guare . Hall was last in January 1985 with Geraldine Page in Stephen Porter's production of Jean Giraudoux ' The Madwoman of Chaillot on the New York stage.

From 1952 until her death, Grayson Hall remained married to the one year older screenwriter and producer Sam Hall. A son emerged from the relationship. Grayson Hall last lived in a property built in 1799 in Rhinebeck , near New York. She died of lung cancer in 1985 at the age of 62 .

Plays (selection)

  • 1953: Man and Superman
  • 1955: La Ronde
  • 1955–1956: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Broadway)
  • 1960-1961: The Balcony
  • 1961: The Buskers
  • 1961–1962: Subways Are for Sleeping (Broadway)
  • 1963: The Love Nest
  • 1964: Shout From the Rooftops
  • 1966: Those That Play the Clowns
  • 1971: Last Analysis
  • 1971: Friends and Relations
  • 1971: The Screens
  • 1973: Secrets of the Citizens Correction Committee
  • 1975: The Sea
  • 1975: What Every Woman Knows
  • 1975: The Leaf People (Broadway)
  • 1976: Jack Gelber's New Play: Rehearsal
  • 1977: Happy End (Broadway)
  • 1978: Rib Cage
  • 1980: The Suicide (Broadway)
  • 1985: The Madwoman of Chaillot

Filmography (selection)

Feature films

  • 1961: Run Across the River
  • 1962: Satan in high heels
  • 1964: Parisienne and the Prudes
  • 1964: The Night of the Iguana ( The Night of the Iguana )
  • 1965: Everything for the cat ( That Darn Cat! )
  • 1966: Who are you, Polly Maggoo? ( Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? )
  • 1970: The road to the abyss ( End of the Road )
  • 1970: Castle of the Vampires ( House of Dark Shadows )
  • 1970: Adam at Six AM
  • 1971: The Castle of Lost Souls ( Night of Dark Shadows )
  • 1972: Gargoyles (TV)
  • 1974: Diamond Quartet ( The Great Ice Rip-Off )

TV Shows

Awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Jamison, RJ: Grayson Hall: a hard act to follow . New York: iUniverse, 2006. - ISBN 978-0-595-40462-9 . P. 1
  2. ↑ cf. Jamison, Rebecca: Chronicling the Life of Grayson Hall at home.comcast.net (accessed November 15, 2009)
  3. ↑ cf. Jamison, p. 4
  4. ↑ cf. Jamison, p. 5
  5. ↑ cf. Jamison, pp. 7-9
  6. ↑ cf. Jamison, pp. 9-10
  7. ↑ cf. Jamison, pp. 11-13
  8. ↑ cf. Jamison, pp. 14-17
  9. ↑ cf. Jamison, p. 1
  10. ↑ cf. Jamison, p. 20
  11. ↑ cf. Jamison, pp. 26-28.
  12. ↑ cf. Jamison, pp. 34-35
  13. ↑ cf. Jamison, pp. 51-53
  14. ↑ cf. Biography in the Internet Movie Database (accessed July 11, 2009)
  15. ↑ cf. Jamison, p. 54
  16. ↑ cf. Jamison, p. 63
  17. ↑ cf. Jamison, p. 70
  18. ↑ cf. Grayson Hall, Actress, Of Stage, TV and Film . In: The New York Times, Aug 9, 1985, p. 15
  19. ↑ cf. Jamison, pp. 79-80
  20. ↑ cf. Film review by Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, July 1, 1964
  21. ↑ cf. Jamison, p. 95
  22. ↑ cf. Jamison, p. 95
  23. ↑ cf. Young, Ray: Book Review at home.comcast.net (accessed November 15, 2009)
  24. ↑ cf. Jamison, p. 1
personal data
SURNAME Hall, Grayson
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grossman, Shirley (real name); Grayson, Shirley
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American theater and film actress
DATE OF BIRTH September 18, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH 7th August 1985
Place of death New York , New York