West, Mae

West, Mae [ Mary Jane] (1892–1980), actress and playwright. The blonde, busty, Brooklyn‐born performer who came to epitomize a bawdy, if somewhat tongue‐in‐cheek, sexuality, began acting in stock at the age of five. From 1911 to 1921 she appeared in a number of Broadway musicals even as she headlined in vaudeville. West specialized in leeringly risqué songs, although when one of E. F. Albee's agents or the police were known to be in the theatre, she is said to have offered the lyrics with a childish innocence, which suggested she did not know the meaning of what she said. West caused a furor and ultimately was jailed for her performance as Margie LaMont, the prostitute, in her own play Sex (1926). Her next play, The Drag (1927), was considered so off‐color that it was banned in New York. West scored a major success as a barroom hostess, the title role of her play Diamond Lil (1928), which was revived in 1949. Several other plays failed, but she enjoyed one final hit, apart from the 1949 revival, when she portrayed the famed Russian empress in her play Catherine Was Great (1944). West's curtain speech during its run was “Catherine had 300 lovers. I did the best I could in a couple of hours.” Her highly popular films during the 1930s helped lead to a tightening of Hollywood's moral codes. Autobiography: Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, 1959. Biography: Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, Jill Watts, 2001.