The Passing of William Gillette

In the early twentieth century, William Gillette was the person most Americans associated with Sherlock Holmes. One of the country’s most popular actors, he brought Holmes to life in 1899, in a play he had written with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s permission. Gillette starred as Holmes in theaters around the world for 40 years. Steele was a member of The Players, and Gillette had been one of the club’s founders. Steele was the editor of the club’s newsletter, where this tribute appeared on October 1, 1937. 

The Players lost its last surviving charter member when William Gillette died, last April, at the age of eighty-three years and nine months. Many newspapers stated that he was eighty one, but old friends and neighbors in his native Hartford knew better. He was born on July 24, 1853. At the time of the formation of The Players he was thirty-five. On December 31, 1907 he delivered the memorial address on our Founders Night. His membership continued until 1920, when he relinquished it for a period of nine years. In December 1929, soon after his farewell revival of Sherlock Holmes, he was brought back to our rolls as an honorary member. After that he came here to take part in such events as the Mark Twain dinner and the Booth centenary.

William Gillette was so towering figure in the theater that an account of his career would be a repetition of what most of us know. His bent toward the stage was evident in his boyhood when he built little theaters for himself, wrote and acted plays, ran away from school to be an actor, and neglected various universities for his greater love. Early in the eighties, in the Madison Square Theater days, he was already writing and adapting pieces in which his own peculiar histrionic methods could be utilized. He led a new school of natural acting and realistic stage direction.

Throughout his career the characters fitted the actor. (Being his own playwright made this convenient.) They were dynamic but calm in the midst of tumble, clear-headed or sardonic or bland in the midst of bewilderment and jitters. Sudden outbursts of energy in such characters had an electrical dramatic effect, as in his war plays Held by the Enemy and Secret Service, and in Sherlock Holmes. Later impersonations, in plays of his own devising and in Barrie’s Crichton, expressed the same quiet dominance. He knew his own abilities and limitations as an actor, and he was usually right about plays. He was a showman and a practical genius, having scant patience with any kind of dramatic entertainment that failed to entertain.

More than a quarter-century ago William Gillette was acclaimed as one of the “immortals” of our American Academy. A paper he wrote at the time called The Illusion of the First Time in Acting expresses with inimitable keenness and dry humor his views on the theater. “All this talk about reading plays is nonsense,” he said in effect. “There is no such thing as reading a play. The play is –” but go and read it yourself in our library! Or read the same ideas, differently expressed, in the introduction for his play Sherlock Holmes, published a year or two ago. His writings are like his speech; his private letters, with their humorous quirks and their red ink signals, have the same piquancy and charm.

He was intensely individual both on and off the stage. The reticent New England gentleman never was wholly concealed by the practical man of the world. His detestation of personal publicity was genuine enough, but his efforts to avoid it became news, and his troubles increased. Legends accumulated about his castle on the banks of the Connecticut, about his three-mile miniature railroad, his house-boat, his motor cycle, and his princely hospitality for those friends who could get at him at all.

Twice after his retirement he yielded to the urge to be a trouper again. Managers announced farewell appearances, but Mr. Gillette made no promises. “About every five years I seem to have a fit of revivals,” he said before the curtain of Three Wise Fools, “and I rather like them. I expect to meet you all in 1940.”

His last will and testament was made late in January. In it, after specifying generous bequests to relatives, friends and charities, he wrote: “I would consider it more than unfortunate for me — should I find myself doomed after death to a continued consciousness of the behavior of mankind on this planet — to discover that the stone walls and towers and fireplaces of my home, founded at every point on the solid rock of Connecticut, and many other things of like nature, should reveal themselves to me as in the possession of some blithering saphead who had no conception of where he is or with what surrounded. For this reason I am hoping that my executors, in disposing of this property, as they will be obliged to do, will exercise discrimination in carrying out my earnest wish.” These are not the words of a grudging curmudgeon. They have his usual salty, satiric humor, but one sees in them rather the deep feeling of a sensitive man who loved his life and was sorry to leave it.