Edwin Forrest
| Edwin Forrest | |
|---|---|
Daguerreotype of Edwin Forrest by Mathew Brady
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| Born |
March 9, 1806 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | December 12, 1872 (aged 66) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | Stage Actor |
Edwin Forrest (March 9, 1806 – December 12, 1872), was a prominent nineteenth-century American Shakespearean actor. His feud with the British actor William Charles Macready was the cause of the deadly Astor Place Riot of 1849.
Forrest was born in Philadelphia, the son of William and Rebecca (née Lauman) Forrest. His father, a merchandise peddler, came from Dumfriesshire, Scotland to Trenton, New Jersey in 1791. Later a business set back led him to relocate to Philadelphia where after to his marriage to Rebecca, a daughter of an affluent German-American family, he was able to secure a position with a local branch of the United States Bank.
As boys, Forrest and his brother William joined a local juvenile thespian club and participated in theatrical performances staged in a sparsely decorated woodshed. At the age of eleven he made his first appearance on the legitimate stage at Philadelphia’s South Street Theatre playing the female role Rosalia de Borgia in the John D. Turnbull melodrama, Rudolph : or, The robbers of Calabria. After Forrest’s father died in 1819 he attempted, in short procession, to apprentice with a printer, a cooper and finally a ship chandler. When attending a lecture early the following year he volunteered to participate in an experiment on the effects of nitrous oxide. While under the influence of the gas Forrest broke into a soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Richard III that so impressed John Swift, an eminent Philadelphia lawyer, he arranged an audition at the Walnut Street Theatre that led to Forrest's formal stage début on November 27, 1820 as Young Norval in John Home’s Douglas.
The theatres of New York and Philadelphia were already crowded with trained and successful actors. Forrest therefore set out at once for the south and west. His tour through a rough country — with the inconveniences of long distances, the necessity of presenting his plays in rude halls, insufficient support, and poor scenery — was not altogether successful, but the discipline to mind and body was felt in all his subsequent career. He soon gained fame for portraying blackface caricatures of African Americans.Constance Rourke wrote that his impression was so believable he often mingled in the streets with African Americans unnoticed. He allegedly fooled one old black woman into taking him for a friend and then convinced her to join him in his stage performance that night.
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