Robert Whitehead

Robert Whitehead (born Montreal, Quebec 3 March 1916; died Pound Ridge, New York 15 June 2002) was a theatre producer.

His first production was Medea, starring Judith Anderson and John Gielgud, and he won the Critics' Circle Award five times,

His father owned textile mills, and his mother, Selena Mary LaBatt Whitehead, was an opera singer. (The actor Hume Cronyn was Whitehead's cousin on the LaBatt side.)

He went to Trinity College School in Montreal, then worked as a commercial photographer before studying acting at the New York School of the Theatre.

He spent the Second World War years as an ambulance driver in North Africa and Italy.

In 1964 the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre opened with Robert Whitehead and Elia Kazan as its heads and Harold Clurman as literary adviser.

In 1968 Whitehead married Zoe Caldwell, who starred in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. (His first wife Virginia, an antique dealer whom he married in 1948, died in 1965.) The couple bought property in Pound Ridge, a mountain area in New York State, and built a house there. Caldwell, who won a Tony as Brodie, later appeared for Whitehead in a revival of Medea (with Judith Anderson as the nurse), Lillian, a one-woman show about Lillian Hellman, and Terrence McNally's Master Class, in which she played Maria Callas.

External links

• [1] Obituary of Robert Whitehead.