Neil Simon
Biography
Neil Simon (born 1927) is undoubtedly the most commercially successful playwright of all time. Thirty of his plays have been performed on Broadway and they have been translated into dozens of languages. He is the only playwright ever to have had four Broadway productions running at the same time and more of his plays have [...]
Nancy Walker
Biography
Nancy Walker (1921-1992) was born into a vaudeville family and was destined for a stage career. At first, she wanted to be a singer but, when she auditioned for a small part in Best Foot Forward in 1941, the Broadway impresario George Abbott fell out of his chair with laughter as she was reading the [...]
Molly Picon
Biography
Molly Picon (1898-1992) had a long and distinguished stage career and was considered to be the pre-eminent actress of Yiddish theatre in the United States.
She was brought up in Philadelphia where, a the age of six, she began performing in tramcars and local nickelodeons. She left school in 1915, determined to have a stage career [...]
Moira Lister
Biography
Moira Lister (born 1923) was born in South Africa where her acting career began. There, in 1935, she appeared in Vintage Wine with Sir Seymour Hicks who was so impressed by her that he invited her to England to make a film with him. They arrived on the day that Edward VII abdicated. The film [...]
Milo O’Shea
Biography
Milo O’Shea (born 1926) is a short and sturdy Irish-born actor with bushy black eyebrows, sparkling eyes and appealing grin, whose long and successful acting career has extended over eight decades.
He began as a boy actor in his native Dublin playing Ptolemy in Caesar and Cleopatra and the lead role in Oliver Twist. He continued [...]
Maxwell Anderson
Biography
Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959) was a prolific and successful playwright whose career spanned over thirty years. His first produced play, The White Desert (1923) failed. His next was a success. Written in collaboration with Laurence Stallings, What Price Glory? (1924) told the story of American soldiers in France during the First World War. Further collaborations with [...]
Maureen Stapleton
Biography
Maureen Stapleton (born 1925) trained with Herbert Berghof in New York where she made her Broadway debut in Burgess Meredith’s production of The Playboy of the Western World (1946). For her performance as the emotional widow, Serafina, in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo (1951), she won a Tony Award and achieved stardom. Her subsequent impressive [...]
Maude Adams
Biography
Maude Adams (1872-1953), the daughter of an actor, spent her early years in provincial theatres, sometimes appearing on plays when she was carried onstage in her mother