Hayes, Helen

▪ 1994

      (HELEN HAYES BROWN), U.S. actress (b. Oct. 10, 1900, Washington, D.C.—d. March 17, 1993, Nyack, N.Y.), as the luminous first lady of the American theatre, enraptured audiences with her twinkling eyes and elfin smile and, though diminutive in stature (1.5 m [5 ft]), she exuded a majestic stage presence that made her regal performances in Maxwell Anderson's Mary of Scotland (1933) and Laurence Housman's Victoria Regina (1935) two of her most memorable roles. Hayes, who made her professional stage debut at the age of five and her Broadway bow at the age of nine, established herself as a popular light comedian with brilliant performances in What Every Woman Knows (1926, 1938, and 1954). After her husband, writer Charles MacArthur, coaxed her to Hollywood during the 1930s, she made her motion-picture debut starring in the tearjerker The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) and won the Academy Award for best actress. Other notable film credits include Arrowsmith (1931), A Farewell to Arms (1932), and What Every Woman Knows (1934). Hayes longed for the footlights, however, and resumed her stage career. She received critical acclaim for roles in Anita Loos's Happy Birthday (1946), Mary Ellen Chase's Mrs. McThing (1952), Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1955), Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1956), Jean Anouilh's Time Remembered (1957), and Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet (1958) and Long Day's Journey into Night (1971). Hayes, beset with dust allergies, retired from live theatre in 1971, the year after she earned a best supporting Oscar for her film performance as a dotty old woman stowaway in Airport (1970). She appeared in such television movies as The Snoop Sisters (1972) and Victory at Entebbe (1976) and starred as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in Murder Is Easy (1982), A Caribbean Mystery (1983), and Murder with Mirrors (1985). During her more than 80-year career, Hayes was lavishly honoured. Besides her two Academy Awards, she was the recipient of three Tony awards, an Emmy award, the 1940 Best Radio Actress Award, a Grammy award for a reading of the Bill of Rights, the 1981 lifetime achievement honours from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the 1986 Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1955 New York City's Fulton Theater was renamed the Helen Hayes Theater and, after that structure was razed in 1982, Broadway's Little Theater was christened (1983) with her name. Among her several volumes of autobiography were A Gift of Joy (1965), On Reflection (1968), Twice Over Lightly (1971; with Anita Loos), and My Life in Three Acts (1990). Her daughter died of polio at the age of 19, and her actor-son, James, became identified with the character Danno on the television program "Hawaii Five-O."

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▪ American actress

original name  Helen Hayes Brown 

born Oct. 10, 1900, Washington, D.C., U.S.

died March 17, 1993, Nyack, New York

 American actress who was widely considered to be the “First Lady of the American Theatre.”

      At the behest of her mother, a touring stage performer, Hayes attended dancing class as a youngster, and, from 1905 to 1909, she performed with the Columbia Players. At age nine, she made her Broadway debut as Little Mimi in the Victor Herbert (Herbert, Victor) operetta Old Dutch, and in 1910 she was cast in the one-reel Vitagraph film Jean and the Calico Cat. Specializing in standard ingenue roles during her teen years, she attained a degree of popularity in the touring company of Pollyanna (1917) and the New York productions of Penrod and Dear Brutus (both 1918).

      Cast as the heroine in the 1920 comedy Bab, she became the youngest actress to have her name in lights on Broadway—an occasion that prompted an enterprising distributor to release the only silent film in which she had starred, The Weavers of Life, which had been sitting on the shelf for three years. Uncomfortable with her sudden ascendancy, she refused to believe she had truly “arrived” until 1926, when she was cast as the multifaceted heroine of James Barrie's What Every Woman Knows. Two years later she married the journalist and playwright Charles MacArthur (MacArthur, Charles), a union that lasted until his death in 1956.

  In 1931 Hayes and MacArthur went to Hollywood, where she made her talking picture debut in The Sin of Madelon Claudet, for which she received an Academy Award. Although she made a number of later films, including the 1932 version of A Farewell to Arms, Hayes was unhappy in Hollywood and soon returned to Broadway. In 1933 she scored her biggest stage success to date in Mary of Scotland, surpassing this triumph in 1935 with a tour-de-force performance in Victoria Regina, which ran for three years. Her many subsequent stage credits included Happy Birthday (1946), which earned her the first Tony Award for best actress.

 Except for occasional appearances in such films as My Son John (1952) and Anastasia (1956), Hayes remained essentially a stage performer until 1971, when her chronic asthmatic bronchitis triggered an allergic reaction to stage dust. The previous year, she had won a second Academy Award for her portrayal of an elderly stowaway in the movie Airport (1970), which precipitated a succession of similarly eccentric movie roles. Active until the mid-1980s, she divided her time between film and television work, and in 1973 she costarred with Mildred Natwick in the weekly TV series The Snoop Sisters. She ended her acting career as Agatha Christie (Christie, Dame Agatha)'s elderly sleuth Miss Marple in three well-received television movies during the early 1980s. Hayes published four autobiographies: A Gift of Joy (1965), On Reflection (1968), Twice Over Lightly (1972, with Anita Loos), and My Life in Three Acts (1991). Her daughter Mary MacArthur also pursued a stage career before her death from polio in 1949, and her son James MacArthur was a successful film and TV actor, known mostly for his role on the television series Hawaii Five-O. Showered with awards and citations for her acting and humanitarian activities, Hayes received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986 and held the distinction of having two Broadway theatres named in her honour.

Additional Reading

Jhan Robbins, Front Page Marriage (1982); Kenneth Barrow, Helen Hayes: First Lady of the American Theater (1985); Donn B. Murphy and Stephen Moore, Helen Hayes: A Bio-Bibliography (1993).

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