Webster, Margaret

Webster, Margaret (1905–72), English actress and director, the daughter of the actor Ben(jamin) Webster (1864–1947), himself the grandson of B. N. Webster, and Dame May Whitty (1865–1948), an actress appointed DBE for charitable work during the First World War. They were together in Irving's company at the Lyceum from 1895 and later became very popular in the USA, Margaret being born in New York during one of their visits. She was on the stage for some time as a child, making her first appearance in 1917, and her adult début in the chorus of Euripides' Trojan Women with Sybil Thorndike in 1924. She was a member of Fagan's repertory company in Oxford in 1927, toured with Ben Greet in Shakespeare, and in 1929 was at the Old Vic. After playing a wide variety of parts in London she went to New York in 1936, and, while continuing to act, made an outstanding reputation as a director. Maurice Evans appeared in several of her productions of Shakespeare, and her production of Othello in 1943 with Paul Robeson, in which she played Emilia, broke all records for a Shakespearian play on Broadway. With Eva Le Gallienne and Cheryl Crawford she founded the American Repertory Theatre, playing Mrs Borkman in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman for it the same year, and the Cheshire Cat and the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland in 1947. She also organized a Shakespeare company which toured the United States in 1948–50 by bus and truck, and directed and appeared in An Evening with Will Shakespeare (1952) on tour. Among her other post-war productions were Eva Le Gallienne's translation of Hochwälder's Das heilige Experiment (1943) as The Strong are Lonely (NY, 1953; London, 1955), Shaw's Back to Methuselah in New York in 1958, and Noël Coward's Waiting in the Wings (London, 1960). In 1964 she was seen in London in a solo performance based on the life and works of the Brontë sisters.