Edith Barrett

Edith Barrett (born Edith Barrett Williams; January 19, 1907 – February 22, 1977) was an American actress. She was a romantic star on Broadway and in the Little Theatre Movement in New England summer stock from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. Her repertoire included plays by James M. Barrie, William Shakespeare, Noël Coward, Robert Browning, A.A. Milne, and George Bernard Shaw. Her best-known cinematic work includes I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Ruthless (1948) and Jane Eyre (1943). Biography Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Barrett was the daughter of Marshall S. P. Williams and Edith Barrett Williams and a granddaughter of 19th-century American tragedian Lawrence Barrett. She entered the entertainment industry at age 16 in a staging of Walter Hampden's production of Cyrano de Bergerac. At age 19, in 1926, she appeared with Hampden in Caponsacchi. During the 1930s, she performed as a cast member of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre troupe. While playing Sibil in the Mercury Theatre 1937 production of The Shoemaker's Holiday, she met leading man Vincent Price. The two married in 1938. Barrett moved to Southern California with her husband in late 1939 and gave birth to the couple's and Barrett's only child, author/poet and environmental activist Vincent Barrett (V. B.) Price, in 1940. Their marriage ended in 1948. Barrett is often mentioned in a troika of Broadway stars of the 1930s alongside Eva Le Gallienne, Katherine Cornell, and sometimes Helen Gahagan. Her most famous roles include Pompelia, her first starring role, in Caponsacchi, which ran for five seasons, and as Sara Moonlight in the 1929 play Mrs. Moonlight by Benn Levy, with which she toured the country, performing more than 500 times. After opening night, the New York Times ran a review of her performance with the headline "A Star Is Born."