31 Facts About Edwin Booth

Edwin Thomas Booth was an American actor who toured throughout the United States and the major capitals of Europe, performing Shakespearean plays.

Edwin Booth's achievements are often overshadowed by his relationship with his younger brother, actor John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.

Edwin Booth was the son of the famous actor Junius Brutus Booth, an Englishman, who named Edwin after Edwin Forrest and Thomas Flynn, two of Junius' colleagues.

Edwin Booth was the elder brother of John Wilkes Booth, himself a successful actor, who became notorious as the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln.

In early appearances, Edwin Booth usually performed alongside his father, making his stage debut as Tressel or Tressil in Colley Cibber's version of Richard III in Boston on September 10,1849.

John Wilkes played Marc Antony, Edwin Booth played Brutus, and Junius played Cassius.

Immediately afterwards, Edwin Booth began a production of Hamlet on the same stage, which came to be known as the "hundred nights Hamlet", setting a record that lasted until John Barrymore broke the record in 1922, playing the title character for 101 performances.

From 1863 to 1867, Edwin Booth managed the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City, mostly staging Shakespearean tragedies.

Edwin Booth, who had been feuding with John Wilkes before the assassination, disowned him afterward, refusing to have John's name spoken in his house.

Edwin Booth made his return to the stage at the Winter Garden Theatre in January 1866, playing the title role in Hamlet, which would eventually become his signature role.

Edwin Booth was married to Mary Devlin from 1860 to 1863, the year of her death.

Edwin Booth later remarried, to his acting partner Mary McVicker in 1869, and became a widower again in 1881.

In 1869, Edwin Booth acquired his brother John's body after repeatedly writing to President Andrew Johnson pleading for it.

Johnson finally released the remains, and Edwin Booth had them buried, unmarked, in the family plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.

Edwin Booth was playing the title role in Richard II at McVickers Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, during the final act of the William Shakespeare tragedy.

Gray's shots, which were fired from a distance of thirty-four feet, missed Edwin Booth, burying themselves in the stage floor.

Edwin Booth was not acquainted with Gray, who worked for a St Louis, Missouri dry goods firm.

The attempted assassination occurred on Shakespeare's supposed birthday and came at a time when Edwin Booth was receiving numerous death threats by mail.

In 1888, Edwin Booth founded The Players, a private club for performing, literary, and visual artists and their supporters, purchasing and furnishing a home on Gramercy Park as its clubhouse.

Edwin Booth saved Abraham Lincoln's son, Robert, from serious injury or even death.

The fact that he had saved the life of Abraham Lincoln's son was said to have been of some comfort to Edwin Booth following his brother's assassination of the president.

In 1879 Booth purchased land in Middletown, Rhode Island on the Sakonnet River; he hired Calvert Vaux, whose son Downing Vaux was engaged to Booth's daughter Edwina, to design a grand summer cottage estate there.

Edwin Booth had a small stroke in 1891, which precipitated his decline.

Edwin Booth suffered another stroke in April 1893 and died June 7,1893, in his apartment in The Players clubhouse.

Edwin Booth was buried next to his first wife at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In December 2010, descendants of Edwin Booth reported that they obtained permission to exhume the Shakespearean actor's body to obtain DNA samples to compare with a sample of his brother John's DNA to refute the rumor he had escaped after the assassination.

However, Bree Harvey, a spokesperson from the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Edwin Booth is buried, denied reports that the family had contacted them and requested to exhume Edwin's body.

The Tragedian, by playwright and actor Rodney Lee Rogers, is a one-man show about Edwin Booth that was produced by PURE Theatre of Charleston, South Carolina, in 2007.

In 2014, Edwin Booth was played by Gordon Tanner in The Pinkertons episode, "The Play's the Thing".

Edwin Booth left charitable bequests that furthered the development of the acting profession and the treatment of mental illness.

Edwin Booth left bequests of $5,000 each to the Actor's' Fund, the Actors' Association of Friendship of the City of New York, The Actors' Association of Friendship of the City of Philadelphia, the Asylum Fund of New York and the Home for Incurables.