Mansfield, Richard

Mansfield, Richard (1854–1907), American actor, born in Berlin. Educated in England and on the Continent, he made his first appearance on the stage in London, and then toured in light opera. In 1882 he made his first appearance in New York, again in light opera; but it was as Baron Chevrial in Feuillet's A Parisian Romance (1883) that he first attracted attention. Some of his outstanding parts were the dual title-roles in a dramatization of Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1887) and the title-roles in Clyde Fitch's Beau Brummell (1890), specially written for him, Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1898), and Booth Tarkington's Monsieur Beaucaire (1901). He was first seen as Richard III, later accounted one of his finest parts, during a visit to London in 1889, and among his other Shakespearian roles were Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Brutus in Julius Caesar, and Henry V, making a spectacular appearance after Agincourt on a white horse. He was instrumental in introducing Shaw to America, playing Bluntschli in Arms and the Man in 1894 and Dick Dudgeon in The Devil's Disciple in 1897, Raina in the first and Judith Anderson in the second being played by his wife Beatrice Cameron (1868–1940), whom he married in 1892. She had already played Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House in 1889, and it may have been under her influence that Mansfield, who in general had little sympathy with the ‘new drama’ though he much admired Ibsen's poetic prose, put on in his last season, 1906–7, the first production in English of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, with himself in the title-role.