A woman of extraordinary means.(trends & events)(Brief Article)

American Theatre, March, 2005

NEW YORK CITY: Shakespeare scholars extol only the testosterone bunch: Orson Welles, Harley Granville-Barker, Peter Brook, David Garrick, Laurence Olivier. But mention Margaret Webster, and they draw a blank. One of the great Shakespeare interpreters, famous for her 1943 staging of Othello, starring Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen and Jose Ferrer, Webster (1905-72) was blacklisted by Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee. She was at the brink of being forgotten, until author Milly Barranger wrote her incisive biography Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater, published last year by University of Michigan Press.

This March, Barranger, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor, joins the New York Public Library for the...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.