biography
| name: |
Hayes, Helen
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| |
originally Helen Hayes Brown
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1900–93)
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| biography:
| Stage and film actress, born in Washington, District of Columbia, USA. Best known in roles that combined apparent pliability with inner steel, she made her debut at the age of five. In the 1920s she seemed type-cast as a flapper, but she soon graduated to more substantial roles such as Cleopatra in Caesar and Cleopatra (1925). In 1928 she married playwright Charles MacArthur. She won an Academy Award for the 1932 film The Sin of Madelon Claudet, but her most famous role was in Laurence Housman's Victoria Regina (1935), where she played the queen as she aged from a young woman to an elderly widow. Her longest New York run was Happy Birthday (1946). After 1958 she performed mainly in revivals in the USA and Europe, and in 1964 she formed the Helen Hayes Repertory Company to sponsor Shakespeare readings in universities. She officially retired from the stage in 1970 after playing Veta Louise Simmons in Harvey. |
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