Eva Le Gallienne

by Helen Sheehy

Eva Le Gallienne was a huge star on Broadway before she was twenty-one. She was inspired by the style and brilliance of the Divine Sarah, whom she first saw when she was seven. She was transformed by the incomparable Eleonora Duse, whose denial of self in search of inner truth led Le Gallienne, through years of their intense friendship, to her own emergence as one of the great natural actors of the age. She was taken up at nineteen by Ethel Barrymore, who saw in her a huge talent. At twenty-seven, after appearing in twenty productions, Le Gallienne left Broadway and, following her dream, found and restored a wreck of a building on New York's West Fourteenth Street and created the Civic Repertory Theatre (it became the model for off-Broadway) - putting into production, directing, and starring in as many as forty different plays, including The Three Sisters, The Master Builder, Hedda Gabler, The Cherry Orchard, Peter Pan, Romeo and Juliet, The Seagull, and Alice in Wonderland. After ten