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Walter Hampden was one of the great American stage actors and the only performer, aside from Maurice Evans, to play Hamlet three times on Broadway in the post-World War I-era. Born Walter Hampden Dougherty on June 30, 1879, in Brooklyn, New York, he learned his craft in London, where he made his debut as a professional actor in 1901 with the Frank Benson Stock Company. He spent six years apprenticing in England, where he was thoroughly trained as a classical actor. When he returned to the US in 1907, he toured with the great Russian actress Alla Nazimova in a presentation of the plays of Henrik Ibsen.
Hampden played "Hamlet" on Broadway in 1918-1919, in 1925 (with Ethel Barrymore as his Ophelia at his own Hampden's Theatre), and in 1934. His greatest role was that of Edmond Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac," a part he first performed in 1923 and that he repeated four more times on the Great White Way.
In 1925 he took over management of the Colonial Theatre, a vaudeville house on Upper Broadway, and renamed it Hampden's Theatre. After christening his house with his second Hamlet on October 10, 1925, he played there with his own company through 1930. Later, Hampden helped launch the American Repertory Theatre, playing Cardinal Wolsey in William Shakespeare's "Henry VIII."
Hampden became revered as the grand old man of the American theater. He was president of the Players' Club for 27 years. His last distinguished role on Broadway was in Arthur Millers parable of McCarthyism, "The Crucible," capping a career that spanned a half-century.
Walter Hampden died on June 11, 1955, just three weeks shy of his 76th birthday.- His father was a physician in Rochester, New York, who died when Wilcox was 16. He attended the University of Southern California but soon dropped out. A talent scout spotted him in a summer-stock production of "The Petrified Forest" and a series of "B" movies followed. In 1937 he married Florence Rice, daughter of sportswriter Grantland Rice. They divorced two years later. Wilcox left Hollywood at the start of World War II to serve in the Army, first as a private and eventually as a captain. In 1950 he married the twice-divorced Diana Barrymore who chronicled their bouts with alcoholism in her 1957 autobiography, "Too Much, Too Soon." (She dedicated the book to him.) Wilcox was making a train trip back to his hometown of Rochester when he was found dead in his berth.
- Leslie Swabacker was born on 31 March 1885 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Leslie was a writer, known for Batman (1943), The Desert Hawk (1944) and The Phantom (1943). Leslie died on 11 June 1955 in Santa Barbara, California, USA.
- Pierre Levegh was born on 22 December 1905 in Paris, France. He died on 11 June 1955 in Le Mans, France.