Helen Hayes Collection

Helen Hayes
(1900 – 1993)

We hear time and time again how important it is for an actress to be glamorous. Glamour sells, and movies are big business. By Hollywood standards, if an actress cannot generate sufficient glamour, she is doomed to a career of character parts and will never be more than a B-list player.

Helen Hayes proved that talent is (or at least can be) more important than glamour to bring people to the theater. With an eighty-year long show business career, who is to argue?

Helen's mother, Essie Hayes, was an aspiring actress who craved the glamour of a theater life; the acclaim, the parties, the romance, and the undeniable thrill of an audience's applause. Her father, Francis van Arnum Brown of Washington D.C. on the other hand, was a relatively unambitious man who was at peace with the world around him and more than happy with home and hearth. Essie continued to tour on occasion after Helen's birth, but also took her wifely duties seriously. Frustrated by her husband's lack of ambition, Essie found her glory vicariously by pushing her daughter towards fame.

Somehow, Helen managed to find a middle road between the extremes of her parents. While most of the actresses she worked with would be pretentious and grandiose, Helen's performances were notable for her sense of natural sincerity. Essie sent Helen to Washington's Holy Cross Academy because the school did not require the smallpox vaccination that might "mutilate" the girl's beauty. Fortunately, the nun's were sympathetic to the theater, and Helen appeared as Peaseblossom in the school's production of Midsummer Night's Dream.

Helen was just eight when Essie first took her to the offices of Lew Fields in New York City. Fields signed the little girl and over the years Helen would learn more from the examples of producers like Fields, John Drew and George Tyler than she would have picked up in acting school. At 17, she won public recognition for her work as the lead in Pollyanna, and while on tour her performance was noted for reducing a house filled with rough and tumble ranchers to tears.

Despite her work on stage, Helen remained a rather shy and withdrawn young lady. In the late 1920's she was invited to a boisterous high-society function where she felt she did not fit in. While she sat, trying to think of an excuse to leave, a dapper green-eye gentleman came over to offer her some peanuts. As he poured them into her hand, he whispered "I wish they were emeralds". The gentleman was Chicago journalist and aspiring playwright Charlie MacArthur, and Helen was smitten.

While pregnant with her daughter, Mary MacArthur, Helen was starring in Coquette on Broadway. Helen became sick and had to leave the show, forcing it to close. Rather than pay-off the acting company, the producer tried to claim that Helen's pregnancy was an "Act of God" so that he was not liable. He eventually did have to cough up the money to pay the actors, but Mary was tagged as the "Act of God" baby. The MacArthur's also adopted a son, James, who would be immortalized in the role of "Danno" in TV's original Hawaii Five-O. Mary, who also seemed to have inherited her mother's acting talent, was stricken with polio and passed away in 1949 at the age of 19. Charlie MacArthur never recovered from the depression and eventually drank himself to death in 1956.

One of Helen's early film roles was The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931), which was considered a stinker when it was first released. After some scenes were reshot with a screenplay rewritten by Charlie MacArthur, the film went on to considerable success and Helen was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress. Helen would become the second actress to win the "triple crown" of acting; an Oscar for Best Actress, a Best Actress Emmy, and a Tony for Best Actress in 1958.

One of her stage triumphs, Victoria Regina (reprised on The Campbell's Theater hosted by Orson Welles) so impressed Queen Victoria of Spain (Queen Victoria of England's granddaughter) so much that she invited the actress to tea. "How did you ever learn so many things about my grandmother? Why, you laugh like her and talk like her, and who told you of that impatient little shrug she made if anyone tried to sympathize with her or help her when she was old?" the Queen enthused. Helen just shrugged and replied "I guess all old people do the same things, or, at least, Your Majesty's grandmother and my grandmother had a great deal in common."

Helen retired from live theater in 1971, after her doctor told her that "backstage dust" was causing her asthma. The same year, she won her second Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in Airport. The Fulton Theatre in New York had been renamed in her honor in 1955, but in the 1980's a group of businessmen wanted to tear the facility down along with some other buildings to build a hotel. Although Ms. Hayes had not financial stake in the Helen Hayes Theatre, the developers sought her consent to proceed with the project, which was given and parts of the theater were used in the new Shakespeare Center in Manhattan, which Helen helped to dedicate in 1982. Helen Hayes died of congestive heart failure on St. Patrick's Day, 1993. She was 92.

A USA Commemorative postage stamp with Helen Hayes' image was issued in 2011. Her picture and biography were featured in the Supersisters trading card series in 1979. Two Stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame are dedicated honoring Helen Hayes, one at 6258 Hollywood Blvd for her work in Motion Pictures and at 6549 Hollywood Blvd for her contributions to Radio.