Lucille Lortel
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Lucille Lortel (December 16, 1900 – April 4, 1999) was an American actress and theater producer who is remembered as the namesake of an off-Broadway playhouse and theatrical award.
Born Lucille Wadler in New York City, Lucille Lortel was originally an actress during the 1920s (she once recollected comparing breast sizes with Helen Hayes). She went on to become an off-Broadway theater producer and impresario with the help of a wealthy husband, industrialist Louis Schweitzer, whom she married in 1931. Her age was a well-kept mystery until nearly the end of her life.
Lortel founded The White Barn Theatre at her estate in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1947.
The Lucille Lortel Theatre, on Christopher Street, in Greenwich Village, New York City, which hosts the Lucille Lortel Awards for achievement in off-Broadway productions, and the Lortel Archives, which provides the Internet Off-Broadway Database, are named in her honor and supported by her foundation.
She died of natural causes in New York at the age of 98 and is interred at the Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
External links
- "Lucille's Biography" – Official Website of the Louise Lortel Foundation.
- Lucille Lortel at the Internet Broadway Database
- Lucille Lortel at the Internet Movie Database
Related links