Haydon, Julie [née Donella Lightfoot Donaldson] (1910–94), actress. The shyly beautiful daughter of a publisher and editor and his musician wife, she was born in Oak Park, Illinois, but raised in California. Haydon's stage debut was as a maid in a 1929 West Coast revival of Mrs. Bumpstead‐Leigh, and she first appeared in New York in Bright Star (1935). She is best remembered for three later performances: Brigid, the maid caught in the feud between a canon and a schoolmaster, in Shadow and Substance (1938); Kitty Duval, the streetwalker who dreams of a better world, in The Time of Your Life (1939); and Laura, the crippled girl who lives for her collection of glass figurines, in The Glass Menagerie (1945). In 1955 she married the much‐older critic George Jean Nathan and after his death toured in a program of readings from his work.

The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.