Maude Adams
Adams, Maude [née Kiskadden] (1872–1953), actress. One of the most beloved of all American performers, she was first carried onstage by her actress mother, Annie Adams, who was in a Mormon stock company in Salt Lake City where she married James Kiskadden and where her daughter was born. Her husband proving a poor provider, Annie Adams soon resumed her career and encouraged her daughter to follow in her footsteps. Adopting her mother's maiden name, Maude Adams played in small theatres in California before settling in San Francisco. She won her first important notices at the age of five as Little Schneider in Fritz, Our Cousin German. A few years later, Charles Frohman witnessed one of her performances and told her mother she might make a good actress if she could rid herself of her western accent. She moved east in a play called The Paymaster, making her New York debut in 1888, then came to the attention of E. H. Sothern, who cast her as Jessie Deane in Lord Chumley. After appearing in A Midnight Bell (1889) and All the Comforts of Home (1890), Adams played Dora in Men and Women (1890), created especially for her at the request of its producer Charles Frohman, who had by now reconsidered his earlier rejection. Within a year he had paired her with John Drew, beginning with The Masked Ball and continuing until Rosemary in 1896. For some time Frohman had been urging James M. Barrie to dramatize his novel The Little Minister. Watching Adams in Rosemary, Barrie realized he had found his Lady Babbie, so he agreed. The play opened at the Empire Theatre in 1897 with Adams in a starring role for the first time. In 1899 she essayed a highly praised Juliet opposite William Faversham's Romeo, and two years later she was the original American Phoebe in Quality Street. In 1905 she first played the role written with her in mind and with which she always was identified thereafter, the title part in Barrie's Peter Pan. An unhappy William Winter called it “a tolerable performance, in a vein of grotesquerie, pleasantry, impulse and vim,” but most critics agreed with another colleague who said the star was “true to the fairy idea, true to the child nature, lovely, sweet, and wholesome.” After briefly portraying Viola in Twelfth Night (1908), she scored again in yet another Barrie play, as Maggie in What Every Woman Knows. A major disappointment was her failure in the title role of Rostand's Chantecler (1911), which had opened to much ballyhoo and a huge advance sale. Her last important new role was Miss Thing in Barrie's A Kiss for Cinderella (1916). Once coming under Frohman's aegis, she never left him. But after his death in 1915, her relations with his firm began to deteriorate. When matters came to a head in 1918, she announced her retirement, although she was still unquestionably one of the theatre's most popular stars. Over the years many important playwrights, Philip Barry for example, wrote plays with her in mind, hoping to lure her back to the stage. She resisted many offers, returning only twice. During the 1931–32 season she toured as Portia in The Merchant of Venice but refused to bring the play into New York. In the summer of 1934 she played Maria in Twelfth Night in summer stock. Unlike many stars, Maude Adams shunned the limelight. Away from the theatre she was the most private of people, and for much of her later life lived quietly with a woman friend. But she was generous and high principled. She sometimes raised salaries of fellow players out of her own pay and gave thoughtful gifts to kind stagehands. Once, when a theatre owner doubled the cost of gallery tickets because he knew her name would guarantee a sold‐out house, she made him refund the difference before she would perform. “Graceful as a kitten,” she had a small, pointed nose, straight, pale hair, and gray‐green eyes. The noted Chicago drama critic Amy Leslie wrote of her, “She is direct and graceful and alive with the finer, more soulful emotions, so that she sighs and melts and droops with supine pleasantness. She is brightly intelligent and reads . . . with much charming intuition and feeling.” Biography: Maude Adams, An Intimate Portrait, Phyllis Robbins, 1956.
