Our Own Hall of Fame

 CARRIE DUDLEY

 

TOOK HUSBAND’S NAME

Titian-Haired, Tilt-Nosed Leslie Carter Ruled B’way

 

DAYTON DAILY NEWS   FEBRUARY 26, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

 

     An unhappy marriage gave a redhead named Carrie Dudley the drive to carry her to theatrical heights and the name she took with her—Leslie Carter.

     At the turn of the century and for three decades after that, Mrs. Leslie Carter was one of the most famous names on the American stage.

     In Dayton, where she grew up, the beauty with the tip-tilted nose was called a vamp at 13.  A few years later she had 11 different fiancés at the same time, but almost two decades were to pass before Carrie Dudley had Broadway at her feet, too.

     A NATIVE of Lexington, Ky., Carrie came to Dayton with her mother and brother to live just as she entered her teens.  The little family settled in a big, comfortable house on W. Third St. (where the municipal building parking lot is now).

     Carrie was enrolled in the Cooper seminary at First and Wilkinson Sts.  She scored her first theatrical success doing a highland fling there and was soon the town’s undisputed belle.

     WHEN SHE was 18, Carrie was married to a Chicago socialite attorney, Leslie Carter, in a ceremony at Christ Episcopal church described as “the most elegant in Dayton history.”

     But the marriage was to end in divorce and a bitter custody battle for the couple’s son (won eventually by Carter) 10 years later.  It was then that Carrie vowed to take the name Leslie Carter and make it famous.

     SHE WAS 28, titian-haired and striking when a friend introduced her to producer David Belasco and he promptly cast her in a play called “The Ugly Duckling.”  It opened at the Broadway theater on Nov. 10, 1890 and it flopped.

     For two years Belasco tried her in musical comedies but it wasn’t until 1895 that Mrs. Leslie Carter clicked in “The Heart of Maryland.”

     (It was in this play that, swinging on a bell rope, she delivered the famous line: “Curfew must not ring tonight.”)

     OVER THE years success mounted on success—“The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,”  “Madame DuBarry,” “Camille,”  “Stella Dallas.”  Alexander Woollcott called her “the Sara Bernhardt of America.”

     Mrs. Carter remodeled her Dayton home and spent her vacations here.  (In later years the house was sold and torn down and its former owner wrote sentimentally that she “could not bear to drive past the ground on which it had stood.”)

     IN 1906 she married her leading man, an actor named Lou Payne who was several years her junior.  Her own age always troubled her, she insisted on using early pictures of herself, said a calendar should be used to record dates, not birthdays.

     Mrs. Carter scored many successes in London, did a turn in vaudeville and then, in 1917 announced her retirement.  She chose Paris over London for her home because English quarantine laws would have separated her from her many cats and dogs for six months.

     BUT IN 1921 she was lured back to the stage to co-star with John Drew in W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Circle.”  The ageing actress toured in several revivals, co-authored and starred in “The Shanghai Gesture” before she retired again in 1929.

     Mrs. Carter spent her last years in California, and came out of retirement a second time to appear—without much success—in a grade B movie called “Rocky Mountain Mystery” in 1935.  She died in California from a heart ailment when she was 75. The actress’ ashes are interred in Woodland cemetery.

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