Gertrude Lawrence (4 July 1898 – 6 September 1952) was an English actress, singer, dancer and musical comedy performer known for her stage appearances in the West End of London and on Broadway in New York.
Early life Lawrence was born in 1898 in Newington, London, of English and Danish descent. Her name at birth was registered as Gertrude Alice Dagmar Klasen. Other variants of her birth name include Alexandra Dagmar Lawrence-Klasen, and Gertrude Alexandra Dagmar Klasen.
Her father was a basso profondo who performed under the name Arthur Lawrence. His heavy drinking led her mother Alice to leave him soon after Gertrude's birth.Morley, Sheridan, Gertrude Lawrence. New York, New York: McGraw-Hill 1981; , pp. 5–6.
In 1904, her stepfather took the family to Bognor on the Sussex coast for the August bank holiday. While there, they attended a concert where audience members were invited to entertain. At her mother's urging, young Gertrude sang a song and was rewarded with a gold sovereign for her effort. It was her first public performance.Morley, p. 8.
In 1908, to augment the family's meagre income, Alice accepted a job in the chorus of the Christmas pantomime at Brixton Theatre. A child who could sing and dance was needed to round out the troupe, and Alice volunteered her daughter. While working in the production Alice heard of Italia Conti, who taught dance, elocution and the rudiments of acting. Gertrude auditioned for Conti, who thought the child was talented enough to warrant free lessons.
She joined Italia Conti's production of Where the Rainbow Ends;Foreword by Italia Conti to the eighteenth edition of Where the Rainbow Ends. (Conti's training of the cast would lead her to form the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in 1911.) Conti's training led to Lawrence's appearance in Max Reinhardt's The Miracle staged in London and Fifinella, directed by Basil Dean, for the Liverpool Repertory Theatre. At some point during this period, the child decided to adopt her father's professional surname as her own. Dean then cast her in his next production, Gerhart Hauptmann's Hannele, where she first met Noël Coward. Their meeting was the start of a close and sometimes tempestuous friendship and arguably the most important professional relationship in both their lives.Morley, pp. 9–12.
Early stage career Following Hannele, Lawrence reconnected with her father, who was living with a chorus girl. They agreed to let her tour with them in two successive revues, after which Arthur announced he had signed a year-long contract with a variety show in South Africa, leaving the two young women to fend for themselves. Lawrence, now aged sixteen, opted to live at the Theatrical Girls' Club in Soho rather than return to her mother and stepfather.
She worked steadily with various touring companies until 1916, when she was hired by impresario André Charlot to understudy Beatrice Lillie and appear in the chorus of his latest production in London's West End.Morley, pp. 16–21. When it closed, she assumed Lillie's role on tour, then returned to London once again to understudy the star in another Charlot production, where she met dance director Francis Gordon-Howley. Although he was twenty years her senior, the two wed and soon after had a daughter Pamela, born on 28 May 1918, who was Lawrence's only child. The marriage was not a success, and Lawrence took Pamela with her to her mother's home in Clapham. The couple remained separated but did not divorce until ten years later.Morley, pp. 24–29, 61.
In 1918, either during Lawrence's pregnancy or shortly after she gave birth, she contracted lumbago. Charlot gave her two weeks to recuperate. He saw Lawrence at an opening night party at Ivor Novello's invitation two days before she was cleared to return to work by her doctor. Charlot immediately fired her. When the apparent reason for her dismissal became common knowledge among other West End theatrical producers, she was allegedly unable to find work, according to some sources. (The veracity of this information is put in doubt by a theatre programme for the opening performance of Charlot's revue Buzz Buzz on 20 December 1918, which clearly shows that Lawrence was in the cast at that time,Theatre programme for the opening performance of the Charlot revue Buzz Buzz 20 December 1918. (On opening night the title of the revue was given as "-------- --------".) and there is no evidence that she could have left the cast during its 613-performance run that ended on 13 March 1920.)
In early 1919, Lawrence accepted a job singing at Murray's, a popular London nightclub, where she remained for the better part of the next two years. While performing there she met Captain Philip Astley, a member of the Household Cavalry. He became her friend, escort, and ultimately lover, and taught her how to dress and behave in high society.
At the end of 1920, Lawrence left Murray's and began to ease her way back into the legitimate theatre while touring in a music hall act as the partner of popular singer Walter Williams. In October 1921, Charlot asked her to replace an ailing Beatrice Lillie as star of his latest production, A to Z, opposite Jack Buchanan. In it the two introduced the song "Limehouse Blues," which went on to become one of Lawrence's signature tunes.Morley, pp. 35–37.
In 1923, Noël Coward developed his first musical revue, London Calling!, specifically for Lawrence. Charlot agreed to produce it, but brought in more experienced writers and composers to work on the book and score. One of Coward's surviving songs was "Parisian Pierrot", a tune that would be identified closely with Lawrence throughout her career.
The show's success led its producer to create André Charlot's London Revue of 1924, which he took to Broadway with Lawrence, Lillie, Jack Buchanan and Constance Carpenter. It was so successful it moved to a larger Broadway theatre to accommodate the demand for tickets, extending its run. After it closed, the show toured the United States and Canada, although Lawrence was forced to leave the cast when she contracted double pneumonia and pleurisy and was forced to spend fourteen weeks in a Toronto hospital recuperating.Morley, pp. 44–54.
Charlot's Revue of 1926, starring Lawrence, Lillie, and Jack Buchanan, opened on Broadway in late 1925. In his review, Alexander Woollcott singled out Lawrence, calling her "the personification of style and sophistication" and "the ideal star."Morley, pp. 57–58. Like its predecessor, it toured following the Broadway run. It proved to be Lawrence's last project with Charlot. In November 1926, she became the first British performer to star in an American musical on Broadway when she opened in Oh, Kay!, with music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and a book by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse. Following a run of 256 performances, the musical opened in London’s West End, where it ran for 213 performances.Morley, pp. 61–9.
When Lawrence became romantically involved with Wall Street banker Bert Taylor in 1927, Philip Astley proposed marriage, an offer Lawrence refused because she knew Astley would expect her to leave the stage and settle in rural England.Morley, pp. 63–64. The two remained close until he married actress Madeleine Carroll in 1931.Morley, pp. 32–4. When Lawrence divorced Francis Gordon-Howley, she and Taylor became engaged and remained so for two years, with each free to enjoy a social life separate from the other.Morley, pp. 68–9.
In 1928, Lawrence returned to Broadway opposite Clifton Webb in Treasure Girl, a Gershwin work she was confident would be a huge hit. Anticipating a long run, she arrived in New York with her daughter Pamela, a personal maid and two cars, and settled into a flat on Park Avenue. Her instincts about the musical were wrong; audiences had difficulty accepting her as an avaricious woman who double-crosses her lover, and it ran for only 68 performances.Morley, pp. 70–1. She starred opposite Leslie Howard in Candle Light, an Austrian play adapted by Wodehouse, in 1929, and in 1930–31 she and Noël Coward triumphed in his play Private Lives, first in the UK, and later on Broadway. In 1930, Johnny Green composed his most famous song "Body and Soul" especially for Gertrude Lawrence.
While working in Manhattan, Lawrence started studying with vocal coach Estelle Liebling to prepare for her performances on the Broadway stage. Lawrence continued to study with Liebling for many years.
Later stage career In 1936, Lawrence and Coward starred in Tonight at 8.30, a cycle of ten one-act plays he had written specifically for the two of them. In 1937, she appeared in the Rachel Crothers drama Susan and God; NBC televised a performance of some scenes, with Lawrence and the Broadway cast using duplicate stage sets in its studios.Settel, Irving and Laas, William. "A Pictorial History of Television," Grosset & Dunlap, 1969, 43.
Lawrence also starred in 1939's Skylark, a comedy by Samson Raphaelson. Lawrence felt the play needed work prior to opening on Broadway, and a run at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, was arranged. The theatre was run by Broadway producer Richard Aldrich, and he and the actress became involved in a romantic relationship. The two wed on her birthday in 1940 and remained married until her death in 1952.Morley, pp. 134–37. They had homes in Dennis and in Turtle Bay, Manhattan.
In June 1941, Lawrence's daughter Pamela married a New York doctor named William G. Cahan. The ceremony was held at the Dennis home of Lawrence and Aldrich.Cahan, William G., No Stranger to Tears: A Surgeon's Story. New York, New York: Random House, 1992; , p. 50. Lawrence was friendly with her son-in-law but lost contact with him after his 1950 divorce from Pamela, according to Cahan's memoir that was published in 1992.Cahan, William G., No Stranger to Tears: A Surgeon's Story. New York: Random House, 1992; , pp. 130–131. Lawrence did not have any grandchildren during her lifetime.
Lawrence returned to the musical stage in Lady in the Dark in 1941. It originally had been planned as a play with recurrent musical themes for Katharine Cornell by Moss Hart, Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin, but by the time the first act was completed it was clear it was very much a musical that Cornell agreed was beyond her capability as a performer. Soon after this, Hart met Lawrence at a rehearsal for a revue designed to raise funds for British War Relief, and he offered her the role of Liza Elliott, a magazine editor undergoing psychoanalysis to better understand why both her professional and personal lives are filled with indecision.
The show was very ambitious and stretched the star's talents for singing, dancing and acting. Her performance prompted Richard Watts of the New York Herald Tribune to call her "the greatest feminine performer in the American theatre," and Brooks Atkinson described her as "a goddess" in his review in The New York Times. She remained with the show throughout its Broadway run and its subsequent national tour over the next three years.Morley, pp. 142–51.
Decades later, Ira Gershwin told American songwriting historian Sheila Davis about a contribution Lawrence made to honing the lyrics of the song "My Ship" in Lady in the Dark. "During a Lady in the Dark rehearsal," Davis wrote, "Gertrude Lawrence suddenly stopped singing midline and called out to Gershwin, who was monitoring from the orchestra, 'Why does she say "I could wait four years" – why not five or six?' Of course, the line was 'I could wait for years.' The painstaking lyricist immediately substituted the to clarify the aural ambiguity."Davis, Sheila, The Craft of Lyric Writing. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books 1985; , p. 283.