Augustin Daly

John Augustin Daly was one of the most influential men in American theatre during his lifetime. Drama critic, theatre manager, playwright, and adapter, he became the first recognized stage director in America. He exercised a fierce and tyrannical control over all aspects of his productions. His rules of conduct for actors and actresses imposed heavy fines for late appearances and forgotten lines and earned him the title "the autocrat of the stage." He formed a permanent company in New York and opened Daly's Theatre in New York in 1879 and a second one in London in 1893.

Augustin Daly was born in Plymouth, North Carolina to Captain Denis Daly, a sea-captain and ship owner, and Elizabeth, daughter of Lieutenant John Duffy of the British Army. He was educated at Norfolk, Virginia, and in the public schools of New York City. His mother, early left a widow, brought her two boys to New York City, where they soon became frequent attendants at the theaters and were members of amateur groups, which under such names as the "Burton Association" or the "Murdoch Association" were the precursors of the Little Theatre Movement.

He was dramatic critic for several New York papers from 1859, and he adapted or wrote a number of plays, Under the Gaslight (1867) being his first success. In 1869 he became the manager of the Fifth Avenue Theatre on 24th St. and in 1873 the Fifth Avenue Theatre on 28th. In 1879 he rebuilt and opened Daly's Theatre at Broadway and 30th Street in New York, and, in 1893, Daly's Theatre in London.

At the first of these, he gathered a company of players, headed by Ada Rehan, which made for it a high reputation, and for them he adapted plays from foreign sources, and revived Shakespearean comedies in a manner before unknown in America. He took his entire company on tour, visiting England, Germany and France, and some of the best actors on the American stage have owed their training and first successes to him. Among these were Clara Morris, Sara Jewett, John Drew, Jr., Maurice Barrymore, Fanny Davenport, Agnes Ethel, Maude Adams, Mrs. Gilbert, Tyrone Power, Sr., Ada Dyas, Isadora Duncan, Maud Jeffries and many others. Daly's willingness to, as he put it, "stoop to the curb and bestow upon the low, untried actor a chance at greatness" earned him the nickname "Little Man Auggie" among his peers. His play Leah the Forsaken, adapted from Hermann Salomon Mosenthal's Deborah, was a star vehicle for Margaret Mather.

His Shakespeare productions were often severely criticized by George Bernard Shaw, who was active as a drama critic during those years. Shaw took Daly to task for cutting Shakespeare's plays and for presenting them in unorthodox ways. (Shaw was a strong believer in presenting Shakespeare's plays uncut.) Several of Shaw's criticisms of Daly's Shakespeare productions were reprinted in the anthology Shaw on Shakespeare.

In 1894, he was awarded the Laetare Medal by the university of Notre Dame, considered the most prestigious award for American Catholics.

Daly was a great book-lover, and his valuable library was dispersed by auction after his death, which occurred in Paris. Besides plays, original and adapted, he wrote Woffington: a Tribute to the Actress and the Woman (1888).

Dora Knowlton Ranous, a onetime actress in the Daly company, published a 1910 memoir of her experiences entitled Diary of a Daly Débutante.