A little over a year after this unexpected close to her brilliant
public career Mary Anderson became Mrs. Antonio F. de Navarro. Her
husband was a native of New York, of Spanish extraction, and like
herself, of Catholic faith. They were married on June 17, 1890, at the
Catholic church at Hampstead, London. During the last half dozen years
of her stage career Mary Anderson had become almost an Englishwoman
by adoption. Her new home was made in the little village of Broadway,
Worcestershire, and there she has always since lived, enjoying the
peaceful life and the domestic happiness for which she longed and which
she so richly deserved. She has two children, a son and a daughter.
There have not been lacking attempts to tempt her again behind the
footlights. Enormous sums have been offered without the least effect.
For charity she has read or sung once or twice in modest programs, but
that is all. The people of Broadway fairly worship her for the gracious
and kindly lady she is. Since her marriage she has made a few visits to
America, and the American public of the theatre was recently reminded
of the former light of its stage when she assisted Robert Hichens in
the dramatization of _The Garden of Allah_. But Mary Anderson, though
she is now well under sixty, for a quarter of a century has been to
most of us only an illustrious name of the past, and to our elders a
tenderly treasured memory.
The estimate of Mary Anderson with which she has usually been
dismissed by the casually critical is that she was not a great actress,
but an unusually handsome, charming and talented woman who is memorable
chiefly as a demonstration that the stage can be the working place of a
wholesome, womanly woman.
As to whether she was a great actress there was and is a wide
difference of opinion. To her more partial admirers she was the
“authentic queen of the American stage,” who in each of her parts
“gave an individual and potential impersonation.”[161] “Such moments
in her acting,” wrote William Winter, who has always been her friend
and admirer, “as that of Galatea’s mute supplication at the last of
earthly life, that of Juliet’s desolation after the final midnight
parting with the last human creature whom she may ever behold, and that
of Hermione’s despair when she covers her face and falls as if stricken
dead, are the eloquent, the absolute, the final denotements of genius.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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