David Warfield

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Warfield, David [né Wollfeld or Wohlfelt] (1866–1951), character actor. The San Francisco–born performer began his theatrical career as an usher at the city's Bush Street Theatre, later advancing to a super and a bit player. By the 1890s he had moved to New York, where he soon became a favorite of audiences at the Casino Theatre and then with Weber and Fields, portraying comic, usually long‐bearded, Jews. He was surprised when David Belasco (whom he knew from his San Francisco days) approached him to star in a more serious role, the Lower East Side peddler and auctioneer Simon Levi in The Auctioneer (1901). Warfield triumphed in the role, as he did as Anton von Barwig in The Music Master (1904). He played the part for three years, then appeared as the aging Civil War veteran Wes Bigelow in A Grand Army Man (1907). Another major success was his portrayal of the title role in The Return of Peter Grimm (1911). The Times hailed the performance of the stocky, square‐faced actor as “tremendously appealing, tender, and natural,” continuing, “His playing is marked throughout by directness, simplicity, understanding, and the economy of means, which in combination spell the great art of acting.” For the next eleven years he played in this and in revivals of his earlier successes, but when he decided to retire at the height of his fame in 1922 he essayed the one last role he was determined to play, Shylock. Critics were divided, and though he toured with the work for two seasons it was one of his rare commercial failures.

Warfield, David [ David Wollfeld or David Wohlfelt] (1866–1951), American actor, who began as a programme seller and later an usher at a San Francisco theatre and in 1888 joined a travelling company, playing Melter Moss in Tom Taylor's The Ticket-of-Leave Man. This failed after a week, and he went into variety, appearing in New York in 1890 in vaudeville and musical comedy. He was Karl in the original production of the popular musical comedy The Belle of New York (1897) and later spent three years in a burlesque company. He was adept at presenting the New York East Side Jew of his day, and had already given proof of fine qualities in his acting when in 1901 Belasco starred him in Klein's The Auctioneer. This was an instantaneous success and had a long run, but it was as the gentle, pathetic, self-sacrificing Anton von Barwig in The Music Master (1904), also by Klein, that Warfield set the seal on his growing reputation. He played nothing else, in New York and on tour, for three years. Among his later successes were Wes Bigelow in Belasco's A Grand Army Man (1907), and the title-roles in The Return of Peter Grimm (1911), also by Belasco, and Wills's Vanderdecken (1915). He was also seen as Shylock in Belasco's 1922 production of The Merchant of Venice, retiring from the stage two years later.