Cornelia Otis Skinner, Actress and Author, Dies
By ALDEN WHITMAN JULY 10, 1979
July 10, 1979, Page 15
The New York Times Archives
Cornelia Otis Skinner, whose quickslilver humor was displayed as an actress, playwright and memoirist, died of a cerebral hemorrhage yesterday morning at her home in New York.
She was 78 years old.
Miss Skinner, whose humor masked her often acerbic observations on customs and times, wrote and delivered her own material for the theater, provoking laughter that was also a balm for her barbs. This talent made her one of the favorite stage personalities of devoted audiences for more than 35 years.
Although most people thought of Miss Skinner as a superb entertainer and pleasant anecdotalist — and she was both of these — she had still another dimension, that of serious biographer. Her “Madame Sarah,” a life of Sarah Bernhardt published in 1967, was praised by, among others, Andre Maurois, himself an outstanding biographer, as being written “with love and devotion.”
The book accented an aspect of Bernhardt that she shared with Miss Skinner, a sense of theater, the dramatic instinct that she employed to make her acting distinctive and memorable. This was specially evident in her plays, in which she filled a stage with contrasting characters. She created, produced and performed in several of these over the years, including “The Loves of Charles II,” “The Empress Eugenie,” “The Mansions on the Hudson” and “The Wives of Henry VIII.”
In these plays — each had sufficient plot to go beyond mere characterizations - Miss Skinner so deftly transformed herself from one role to another that she created the illusion of being a series of different'people. It helped that she had remarkable sense of self‐possession and that she was stately looking, albeit her above‐medium height was not obtrusive when she played the role of slighter women.
Monologues for Troops
Miss Skinner's did monologues for servicemen during World War II. As an actress in a full company, Miss Skinner won critical acclaim in a number of noteworthy roles, including Candida in George Bernard Shaw's play of that name and as Lady Britomart in his “Major Barbara.” She was also Julie Lambert in “Theatre,” which played on Broadway in 1941, and Emily Hazen, the wife of a United States diplomat in Lillian Heliman's “The Searching Wind” in 1944.
Typical of the excellent notices she received throughout most of her life was Burton Rascoe's comment on her Emily Hazen, which she played for 326 performances in New York before taking the play on tour:
“Miss Skinner's role is a difficult one, in that she must portray an unsympathetic character sympathetically; she must be at once triumphant and pathetic in a 30‐year duel of mind and emotions with her closest friend.”
She was just as much a hit in the 50's in “Paris ‘90” and in “The Pleasure of His Company.”
Thousands who never saw Miss Skinner on a stage were entertained by her as a writer with an eye and pen for the absurd and the hilarious. These were particularly marked in “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay,” written with Emily Kimbrough and published in 1942. An account of the adventures of the two women on a Europeari trip in the 20's, the best‐selling memoir was praised by Rose Feld as “a joyous chronicle from beginning to end.”
“Throughout the book,” Miss Feld continued, “Cornelia is the narrator, and she fills the pages with the same sparkle and wit that make her presence on the stage a delight.”
Miss Skinner's multiplicity of skills was nurtured by her parents. Born in Chicago on May 30, 1901, she was the daughter of Otis Skinner, a matinee idol noted for his role in “Kismet,” and of Maude Durbin Skinner, an actress who was much engaged in cultural pursuits after she left the stage when Cornelia was a baby.
In Cornelia's early childhood, the family traveled extensively in this country and in Europe before settling down in Bryn Mawr, Pa. Influenced by her father — “Shakespeare, in the original, and spoken in his golden voice, was a joy and an exciting reality,” she later wrote — the young women acted in school plays and then left Bryn Mawr College as a sophomore to study in Paris.
Her first professional appearance was with her father in 1921 in “Blood and Sand,” a play about bullfighting. After brief run, she went the rounds of casting agencies for a couple of years fearful that she had not found her metier. “Grotesquely thin and gawky, I did my best to disguise a chronic shyness with an appearance of world‐weariness,” she recalled.
“Candida,” in which she appeared on American tour in 1939, seemed to indicate that Miss Skinner was indeed a first‐class actress, and “Theatre,” in 1941, confirmed it for the critics.
A stanch foe of idleness in any form, Miss Skinner was busy, even when she was acting, with writing. All during the 30's, a profusion of light verse and essays poured from her pen and appeared in a diversity of magazines, including The New Yorker. These were collected in books and anthologized in 1941 in “That's Me All Over,” with drawings by Alajalov.
Miss Skinner continued to write essays and self‐mocking anecdotes into the late 50's, and they appeared in book form with such titles as “Nuts in May,” “Bottoms Up!” and “The Ape in Me.” Her humor was dry, biting at times and usually subtle; it was imbedded in stories, certainly embroidered, about her busy life as an actress and author, as a wife and mother and as a Long Island suburbanite. The critic H.B. Woodward summed up Miss Skinner in 1955 as “particularly adept at treating the genteel moment of inadequacy or the small social dilemma.”
Miss Skinner seemed to come into her own as a dramatic actress of great power in the late 40's and 50's. Her successes began when she played Mrs. Erlpuie in “Lady Windermere's Fan” in 1946.
This was followed in 1952 by “Paris ‘90,” a richly mounted costume revue in which she created and played 14 characters. “Fleeting and affectionate vignettes that encompass the whole life of fin de siecle Paris [crowd] the stage with such varied portraiture that you never miss the ensemble,” Walter Kerr said.
Miss Skinner again charmed Broadway in 1958 with “The Pleasure of His Company,” a comedy of manners she wrote with Samuel Taylor. She played Katherine Doughtery, the former wife of a world‐traveling playboy (Cyril Ritchard) who sought to upset his daughter's marital plans. “The part of Jessica's apprehensive mother suits her beautifully,” Brooks Atkinson wrote. “She plays it with taste and distinction, but also with wit — wit not only in the edging of phrases, but also in posture, movement and the silent language of her eyes.”
The play ran on Broadway for a year and then went on tour for most of 1960. And in her spare time, Miss Skinner took some of the material from “Paris ‘90” and interwove it with the fruits of additional research into a narrative history called “Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals: A Sparkling Panorama of ‘La Belle Epoque,’ Its Gilded Society, Irresponsible Wits and Splendid Courtesans.”
Miss Skinner could write in many voices — strictly humorous, serious but not heavy, and commercial. One example of the commercial was the script she turned out for years for the radio series “William and Mary.” She was generally chary of radio appearances except as a guest expert on “Information Please,” and she was little seen on television.
For much of her adult life, Miss Skinner lived on the North Shore of Long Island with her husband, Alden Sanford Blodget, a banker and sportsman, to whom she was married in 1928. After his death in 1969, she moved into a baronial 10‐room cooperative on Lexington Avenue in the 60's.
After the run of “The Pleasure of His Company,” Miss Skinner virtually retired from the stage. Her husband was ill for several years before his death, and Miss Skinner was occupied at home. In recent years, she had been active in ‘promoting actors’ causes. She continued writing, however. Her “Life With Lindsay and Crouse,” published in 1976, was an account of the collaboration of the successful playwrighting team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.
Miss Skinner clearly enjoyed both her life as an actress and her life as a writer. Asked once to choose, she said she really could not, and said: “Acting is less painful than writing and faster.”
Surviving are a son, Otis Skinner Blodget of London, and two stepchildren, Alden S. Blodget Jr. of Princeton, N.J., and Mrs. Peter M. Whitman of Bedford, N.Y.
The funeral will be private; there will be a memorial service in the fall.
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