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Katharine Cornell Papers
Biographical Note
Katharine Cornell was born on February 16, 1893, in Berlin, where her father, Peter
Cortelyou Cornell, a distant relation of Cornell University founder Ezra Cornell, was
studying medicine. Later in 1893, Peter Cornell and his wife Alice Gardner Plimpton
returned to their native city, Buffalo, New York with their daughter, Katharine. Her
father practiced medicine in Buffalo, for several years, but he found his time and interest
increasingly taken up with the family hobby. His father, S. Douglas Cornell had been an
active member of a theatrical group called the Buffalo Amateurs and Peter and his
brother Douglas and sister Lydia also participated in many of the group’s performances.
In 1901 Peter Cornell gave up medicine to devote himself full time to the management of
the Star Theatre. Early exposure to the productions her family was involved in, as well as
touring companies that passed through Buffalo, particularly Maude Adams in Peter Pan,
developed the beginnings in Katharine Cornell of a lifelong passion with the theater.
After attending private schools in Buffalo, Cornell went to Oaksmere School, in
Mamaroneck, New York, where she participated in many theatrical productions.
Determined to pursue a career on the stage, she moved to New York in 1916. After
unsuccessfully auditioning for a role with the Washington Square Players—an
organization which would later become the Theatre Guild, Cornell was allowed to sit in
on their rehearsals as an apprentice. When an actress playing the bit part of the mother in
Bushido: A Japanese Tragedy failed to show up for rehearsals, the company managers
gave the one-line part to the young actress who’d become a constant presence at the
rehearsals, and Katharine Cornell made her New York debut.
After small roles in a few other Washington Square Players productions, such as Plots
and Playwrights and The Life of Man, Cornell was hired by an actress she’d met years
earlier in Buffalo, Jessie Bonstelle, to join her stock touring company in 1919. One of
Cornell’s earliest triumphs came when she played Jo in the 1920 London production of
Little Women. However, in the United States she still wasn’t a star and continued touring
with the Jessie Bonstelle Company, by now she was playing leads in plays such as The
Man Outside in 1920.
Guthrie McClintic was born in Seattle, Washington on August 6, 1893. A sickly child,
with a delicate constitution that prevented him from developing any interest in sports,
McClintic was fascinated by the theater. He saw both touring companies and the local
Seattle groups, including the Charles Taylor Company, where he was especially
impressed by the manager’s wife, the young actress Laurette Taylor. Even though
McClintic’s father was unsympathetic to his ambitions toward the stage, he eventually
prevailed upon his parents to send him east in 1910 for theatrical training at New York’s
Academy for Dramatic Arts.
McClintic found some work as an actor, appearing in a tour of Oliver Twist as well as on
Broadway in such plays as The Truth (1914), Major Barbara (1916) and Captain
Brassbound’s Conversion (1916). However, he gradually realized that although he still
loved the stage, he might belong behind, rather than on it. To this end, he got a job in the
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