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Shirley Booth: Tony Awards
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From All Movie Guide: Born Thelma Ford, Shirley Booth began appearing in amateur plays at age 12, then made her professional stage debut four years later; her Broadway debut, in 1925, was opposite Humphrey Bogart in Hells' Bells. Booth toiled on Broadway for a decade before being cast in her first significant role. Ultimately, her work on stage and radio led to a lead role in Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), for which she won the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Award; she made her screen debut in the film version of that play (1952) and won the Best Actress Oscar for her efforts. Booth did a number of other films, but in her later years she was best-known as the maid Hazel in the TV series Hazel (1961-66). She retired after appearing in the TV series A Touch of Grace (1973). ~ All Movie Guide
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Shirley Booth won a "Best Actress" Oscar in 1953 for Come Back, Little Sheba, and the same year won her 3rd Tony award for Broadway plays, including one in 1950 for the stage production of Sheba in the same role. Booth completed the trifecta in 1962 (and again in 1963) by winning a Best Actress Emmy Award for her hilarious role in Hazel, in which she plays a wisecracking housekeeper.
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BY THE BEAUTIFUL SEA is one of those Broadway shows that ran simply on the box-office value of its star - Shirley Booth. The score (by Arthur Schwartz and Dorothy Fields) isn't really exciting or memorable, and the storyline (about a colorful boardinghouse by the sea) was hackneyed even by 1954's standards. Shirley Booth was the sole reason why BEAUTIFUL SEA ran for a respectable 270 performances, earning Miss Booth a Tony nomination as well as a Donaldson Award. Miss Booth co-stars with Wilbur Evans (who played Emile opposite Mary Martin in the original London run of SOUTH PACFIC), Mae Barnes and Cameron Prud'homme.
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The 1950s began auspiciously with William Inge's first Broadway play, "Come Back, Little Sheba," with Shirley Booth and Sidney Blackmer winning Tony Awards for their powerful performances. Beatrice Lillie was the toast of the town in the hilarious revue "An Evening with Beatrice Lillie" (1952), in which she sang some of her most celebrated songs and acted in some of her most outlandish sketches with Reginald Gardiner for 278 performances. A popular comedy called "Anniversary Waltz "(1954-55), directed by Moss Hart and starring his wife, Kitty Carlisle, and Macdonald Carey, moved from the Broadhurst to the Booth and stayed for ten months; "Time Limit" (1956), a taut drama about the Korean War by Henry Denker and Ralph Berkey, starred Richard Kiley, Arthur Kennedy, Allyn McLerie, and Thomas Carlin and played for 127 performances; Gore Vidal's science fiction delight,"Visit to a Small Planet" (1957), starring Cyril Ritchard as a comic extraterrestrial and Eddie Mayehoff as an imbecilic general, ran for a year; William Gibson's Two for the See-Saw (1958-59), an enchanting two-character love story starring Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft, ran for almost two years; and Paddy Chayefsky's "The Tenth Man," about the exorcism of a dybbuk in Mineola, with Gene Saks as a rabbi and Jack Gilford, George Voskovec, Jacob Ben-Ami, and Lou Jacobi giving sublime performances, played 623 times.
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Born Thelma Booth Ford, August 20, 1898 (one source says 1899), in New York,NY; died October 16, 1992, in North Chatham, MA. Actress. An award-winning actress of stage, screen, and television, Booth was recognized for her hard work and versatility. Early in her career, Booth performed in more than six hundred stock productions. In 1925, she made her Broadway debut in Hell's Bells, and she eventually appeared in some forty Broadway plays, including The Philadelphia Story, The Time of the Cuckoo, and By the BeautifulSea. Booth received an Antoinette Perry Award for her role as an alcoholic's wife in the 1950 play Come Back, Little Sheba, and she received anAcademy Award for the same role in the 1952 film version. Booth may be bestremembered for her portrayal of the exuberant maid on the television series Hazel, for which she won two Emmys.
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In 1953, Booth received the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in Come Back, Little Sheba, becoming the first actress ever to win both a Tony and an Oscar for the same role. The film ... earned Booth "Best Actress" awards from The Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Globe Awards, The New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and National Board of Review. She also received her third Tony, which was her second in the Best Actress in a Play category, for her performance in the Broadway production of Arthur Laurents' play The Time of the Cuckoo.
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