Eva Le Gallienne

Eva Le Gallienne was born in London, the daughter of the English poet Richard Le Gallienne and the Danish journalist Julie Nørregaard. After her parents separated she grew up between Paris, London and Copenhagen. As a girl she saw Sarah Bernhardt on stage and decided to devote her life to the theatre. At 16 she moved with her mother to New York.

By 21 she was a Broadway star, celebrated in Ferenc Molnár’s “Liliom” and “The Swan”. But she disliked commercial show business. In 1926 she founded the Civic Repertory Theatre in Manhattan, where she directed, produced and acted. Her aim was to present the best plays – Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare – at prices everyone could afford. In seven years the company staged 37 plays; her stage version of “Alice in Wonderland” and her flying Peter Pan became legendary. She is regarded as a pioneer of the Off-Broadway and regional theatre movements.

Le Gallienne was a lesbian and as open about it as was possible at the time. Her partners included the actress Alla Nazimova, the writer Mercedes de Acosta, the actress Josephine Hutchinson and the director Margaret Webster, with whom she co-founded the American Repertory Theater in 1946. She told a friend that love between women was “the most beautiful thing in the world”.

She translated Ibsen and Chekhov, taught acting and in 1964 received a special Tony Award. At 77 she returned to Broadway in “The Royal Family” and won an Emmy for the television version. She died in 1991 in Weston, Connecticut, aged 92.