Lester Wallack

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Wallack, [John Johnstone] Lester (1819–88), actor and manager. The son of James William Wallack, he was the only major member of the Wallack family born in America. However, despite his birth in New York, he acknowledged his English background by serving his theatrical apprenticeship in England and in Ireland. His American debut did not occur until 1847 when he appeared at the Broadway Theatre as Sir Charles Coldstream in Used Up. His contemporary, W. J. Florence, described him as “tall, straight as an Indian, graceful and distinguished in appearance. Piercing black eyes, an abundance of jet black hair, shapely limbs, small extremities, and, withal, a figure that permitted a perfect fitting of tastefully chosen clothes, were among the advantages that he once possessed and which made him almost Hyperion.” For a time he played under William Burton, where he won applause as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Charles Surface. When his father formed the ensemble that was to be one of America's great companies for over three decades, he joined it and within a few years took over its management. Wallack played nearly three hundred roles with the company, including Orlando, Benedick, and Marlow as well as leading parts in such contemporary works as Ours, Diplomacy, A Scrap of Paper, and his own dramatization of Rosedale. His tenure was praised for the excellence of his productions and his actors' performances but was also criticized for his failure to mount many classics and his dismissal of native American works. (He once told Bronson Howard that he might accept an early draft of Howard's Civil War play Shenandoah if it were reset in the Crimea.) With the rise of Augustin Daly in the 1870s, Wallack's star began to fade slightly; however, he remained an honored figure until his retirement in 1887. Autobiography: Memories of Fifty Years, 1889.

Wallack, Lester [ John Johnstone] (1820–88), American actor, son of James Wallack the elder, with whom he first appeared on the stage in the English provinces. In 1845 he was in Manchester with Charlotte Cushman and Helen Faucit, and soon after made his début in New York at the Broadway Theatre. In 1850, as a member of Burton's company, he gave excellent performances as Aguecheek in Twelfth Night and Charles Surface in Sheridan's The School for Scandal, and then became stage-manager for his father at Wallack's Lyceum, where he also played a wide range of comic and romantic parts. Under his management the Star Theatre, which the elder James Wallack opened in 1861 and immediately relinquished, flourished until 1881, when Lester moved to a new Wallack's Theatre, remaining there until the year before his death. He concentrated on the production of plays by English dramatists, particularly T. W. Robertson, and one of his finest parts was Elliot Grey in his own adaptation of a novel, Rosedale (1863), in which he appeared for many years. He was also good as Benedick in an 1867 production of Much Ado about Nothing, after which he staged no more of Shakespeare's plays until 1880, when he put on As You Like It.