Biography

In the film The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941), a film noted for dropping the names of famous persons of the day, Cornell's name is dropped more than that of any other celebrity.

At the age of 58, she recreated the role of "Elizabeth Barrett" in "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" episode of Producers' Showcase (1954) on live television in 1956, twenty-five years after she first played it in the original 1931 Broadway production.

Born in Germany to U.S. parents, but raised in New York State.

She appeared in only one Hollywood film (playing herself) - Stage Door Canteen (1943), but she is considered one of the great American stage actresses of the twentieth century.

Won Broadway's 1948 Tony Award as Best Actress (Dramatic) for a revival of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" - an award shared with Judith Anderson for "Medea" and Jessica Tandy for "A Streetcar Named Desire".

I drifted into acting. My grandfather had a house in Buffalo in which there was a stage and his friends met every two weeks or so to put on plays. So it was natural for me to put on plays too when I went to boarding school. I put on everything in the drama - I was indiscriminate. I put on Yeats and Shaw and Lady Gregory.

If not for [husband] Guthrie [McClintic], I think I would have continued just drifting. He wanted to be an actor and my career was a sublimation of his desire, because he could pour his talents through me and that was a great advantage to me. I continued in the theater buoyed up mostly by his enthusiasm for it. He was one of those people who fascinated you always. You were never bored; sometimes upset, but never bored.

The audience may not have felt it was right and the author may have felt a little upset, but every part I've played I've twisted around in my mind until I've made it into something of my own. Looking back over it, I didn't deliberately sit down and plan like that, but it does read like it.

We opened up the road. We made "The Barretts [of Wimpole Street]" and "Candida" pay for Shakespeare. "The Barretts" never played to an empty house - the receipts would be something like $33,000, then about $28,000 for "Candida" and for "Juliet" about $18,000 to $19,000, so that we came back having more than broken even. We really felt prideful. We continued like that for many years, alternatively New York with the road, paying for ourselves with Sidney Howard's "Alien Corn," Shaw's "St. Joan" and "The Doctor's Dilemma" and some of the others - until later on, when costs got too high with "Anthony and Cleopatra," we had to call in angels.

I was nervous from the very beginning and it got worse as the years went on. I was conscientious and wanted to do more, always, than I was able. I don't think, when I was playing, that I was ever happy - beginning at 4 o'clock any afternoon.