Actors - Laurette Taylor

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	Actors - Laurette Taylor

Laurette Taylor (April 1, 1884 - December 7, 1946) was an American actress, primarily on stage, with some forays into silent film. She is considered by many a leading figure of the twentieth century theater. Major roles include the title character in Peg o' My Heart and the indomitable but deluded Southern matriarch Amanda Wingfield in the original Broadway production of the Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie
, a legendary performance that marked one of the most dramatic comebacks in theater history.

Laurette Taylor was most likley born Helen Loretta Cooney (although other birth names have been tossed about) in New York City of Irish Catholic extraction.

She married her first husband, Charles A. Taylor, around 1900, and they had two children, Dwight and Marguerite, but they divorced around 1910. In 1912 she married British-born playwright J. Hartley Manners, who wrote Peg o' My Heart and produced the film version, which starred Marion Davies. Taylor remained married to Manners until his death in 1928. She never remarried.

Laurette Taylor suffered from severe alcoholism for many years, a condition which sharply limited her appearances from the late 1920s through her re-emergence in Menagerie in 1945 and which almost certainly contributed to her death from a coronary thrombosis at the relatively young age of 62.

Writing after Taylor's death, Tennessee Williams paid tribute to "the great warmth of her heart," saying, "There was a radiance about her art which I can compare only to the greatest lines of poetry, and which gave me the same shock of revelation as if the air about us had been momentarily broken through by light from some clear space beyond us."

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