Walter Hampden Overview:

Actor, Walter Hampden, was born Walter Hampden Dougherty on Jun 30, 1879 in Brooklyn, NY. Hampden died at the age of 75 on Jun 11, 1955 in Los Angeles, CA and was cremated and his ashes given to family or friend.

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Walter Hampden Quotes:

Linus Larrabee: After all, this is the 20th century, Father.
Oliver Larrabee: Twentieth century? Why, I could pick a century out of a hat, blindfolded, and come up with a better one.


Oliver Larrabee: All columnists should be beaten to a pulp and converted back into paper!


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Walter Hampden Facts
The New Colonial Theatre, in New York, was re-named Hampden's Theatre in 1925, in his honor. It kept the name until 1931.

Hampden owned and operated Hampden's Theatre on Broadway at 62nd St. after he bought the Colonial, a 20-year-old theater that had been used for vaudeville for practically its entire life span. Hampden and his company opened his theater on October 10, 1925 with "Hamlet." (It was the second time he had tackled the role; Ethel Barrymore, sister of his Shakespearian rival John Barrymore, the great American Hamlet of the 20th century, was his Ophelia.) Hampden staged 16 plays, in total, at the theater, including his great success "Cyrano de Bergerac," before closing the theater in March 1930 as The Great Depression began its oppression of the New York theater during the Thirties. In 1931, the Hampden became a movie house, the RKO Colonial Theatre. After returning to the Broadway fold as a legitimate house in 1974 (the Harkness Theatre), it was razed in 1977.

From 1922, when John Barrymore staged his first Hamlet, until 1975, when Sam Waterston assayed the role, Barrymore and Hampden were the only American actors to play Hamlet on Broadway. Hampden played the role three times on the Great White Way: in 1918, 1925 and 1929. Stephen Lang, who played the Dane in 1992, is the only other American in more than three-quarters of a century to star in "Hamlet" on Broadway. In that time, Hamlet was dominated by British performers, particularly Maurice Evans, an English immigrant who became an American citizen, who was the only other man since World War One to play Hamlet three times on the Broadway stage. The other British subjects to play the role on Broadway in that period were Sir John Gielgud (considered by many to be THE Hamlet of the 20th century), Leslie Howard, Sir Donald Wolfit, future Canadian Stratford Festival founder John Neville, Richard Burton, Nicol Williamson (considered by some to be the definitive portrayal of the late 1960s) and
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