Hayes, Helen

Hayes, Helen [ Helen Brown] (1900–93), American actress, a tiny woman who became a theatrical grande dame. She made her first appearance on the stage at the age of 5, played the lead in Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy at 7, the dual lead in Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper at 8, and graduated easily to adult roles from about 1920 onwards by way of Eleanor Porter's Pollyanna and Margaret in Barrie's Dear Brutus. She scored a great success in Kaufman and Connelly's To the Ladies (1922) and appeared for the Theatre Guild as Cleopatra in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (1925). In 1933 she was again outstanding as Mary Queen of Scots in Maxwell Anderson's Mary of Scotland. Her greatest triumph, however, was the title-role in Laurence Housman's Victoria Regina (1935) in New York and later throughout the USA. She was much admired in 1940 as Viola in Twelfth Night and made her first appearance in London in 1948 as the mother in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. She gave a moving performance as Nora Melody in O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet (1958), and then played mainly in revivals. In 1962 she and Maurice Evans presented Shakespeare Revisited, a programme of scenes from the plays, on a nation-wide tour. She retired from the stage in 1970.