Hopkins, Arthur (Melancthon)

Hopkins, Arthur [Melancthon] (1878–1950), producer and director. One of the most distinguished of Broadway producers, he was born in Cleveland and spent time as a newspaper reporter (he was the first to uncover background material on Leon Czolgocz, President McKinley's assassin) before becoming a vaudeville press agent, with Irene and Vernon Castle as his most famous clients. Hopkins's first production, Steve (1912), failed to run, but The Poor Little Rich Girl (1913) brought him his initial success. Later hits (solo or with others) included On Trial (1914); Good Gracious Annabelle (1916); A Successful Calamity (1917); The Jest (1919); Anna Christie (1921); The Hairy Ape (1922); The Old Soak (1922); What Price Glory? (1924); Burlesque (1927), which he co‐authored; Paris Bound (1927); Machinal (1928); Holiday (1928); The Petrified Forest (1935); and The Magnificent Yankee (1946). He was also responsible for bringing John Barrymore to the stage in Richard III (1920) and Hamlet (1922), as well as for Lionel Barrymore's Macbeth in 1921 and Ethel Barrymore's Juliet in 1922. As a rule, Hopkins directed all his own productions and wrote the modern‐day version of Hamlet called Conquest (1933). In conjunction with the Shuberts, he built the Plymouth Theatre in New York. Hopkins also wrote two books: How's Your Second Act? (1931) and an autobiography, To a Lonely Boy (1937). In the latter he expressed a philosophy of producing in which “the final test of producers. . .is the amount of new talent they have brought into the theater. It was the joy of old producers like Belasco and Tyler to develop new talent. That was the high adventure of the theater.” John Mason Brown remembered him as “that amazing, moon‐faced little cherub. . .looking like a small town banker and thinking like an artist.”