Katharine Cornell was an American actress, producer and writer.
She is considred to be one of the greatest American actresses of theatre, and is most remembered for her role as English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the 1931 Broadway production called The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
Katharine Cornell was born in 1893 to a wealthy and prominent family. She moved to New York to pursue an acting career in 1915 after the death of her mother. Cornell's first major Broadway role was in Clemence Dane's A Bill of Divorcement (1921). She also produced various plays through her association with the Actor's Theatre - including Romeo and Juliet (1934) and St. Joan (1936). During the war, she contribued to the American Theatre Wing for War Relief.
"The most exciting lovers are the lovers that we don't talk about." - Katharine Cornell tells a fan in A.R. Gurney’s The Grand Manner.
In 1921, she married fellow producer and director Guthrie McClintic. She was a lesbian, he was gay, and their marriage was lavender. She had relationships with actress and playwright Nancy Hamilton, actress Tallulah Bankhead and poet Mercedes de Acosta among others.
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, known by her pen name "Colette", is one of the most famous authors in French literature. In 1945, she was the second woman to be elected a member of the Académie Goncourt, of which she served as president from 1949 to 1954. She was the first woman in France to receive a state funeral.
Colette was also a journalist (over 50 years, she wrote over 1,200 articles published in some 100 newspapers) and a music-hall performer.
Her literary work was largely inspired by her childhood memories spent in the countryside of the French region of Burgundy, her love of nature, and her relationship with her mother, Sidonie "Sido" Landoy.
Female friendships and lesbianism are two other major themes in her work, particularly in the series of five semi-autobiographical novels known as " Les Claudine."
Colette had numerous affairs with women, including Mathilde de Morny, Georgie Raoul-Duval, Natalie Clifford Barney, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Armande de Polignac, and Mata-Hari. She was also a friend of Renée Vivien, to whom she dedicated a chapter in her book "The Pure and the Impure."
Between 1906 and 1912, Colette pursued a music-hall career, performing in orientalist-inspired pantomimes in scantily clad costumes that scandalized audiences. In 1907, her lover Mathilde de Morny, with whom she had an affair from 1906 to 1911, appeared on stage alongside her. Mathilde de Morny, who bore the title of Marquise de Belbeuf, was a well-known figure in the social circles of Belle Époque Paris. Openly lesbian, she dressed as a man in public (wearing trousers), which was illegal at the time.
In the pantomime "Dream of Egypt," Mathilde de Morny played an Egyptologist who awakened a mummy, played by Colette, by giving it a kiss. This lesbian kiss caused such a scandal that the show was banned after its first performance.
Constance Collier was an English stage and film actress, as well as acting coach, playwright and screenwriter. She made her stage debut at the age of three as Fairy Peasblossom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1893, she joined the infamous Gaiety Girls, a dance troupe based at the Gaiety Theatre in London.In 1907, she starred in Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's extravagant revival of Antony and Cleopatra. In 1922, she appeared in the silent film The Bohemian Girl alongside Gladys Cooper and Ellen Terry.
In the late 1920s, she relocated to Hollywood, where she became a renowned acting and diction coach, ensuring actors a smooth transition from silent to talking films. She appeared in Stage Door (1937), with Katharine Hepburn.
According to actress Natalie Schafer, "Collier was one of Kate Hepburn’s best friends, but the one she was mad about was Dietrich. Connie pursued Dietrich in the mid 1930s." When Collier died, her secretary, Phyllis Wilbourn, who was also her lover and partner, started working for Hepburn and lived with her. Alfred Hitchcock famously cast Collier in Rope (1948) specifically for the lesbian air she’d bring to a small part. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Lorraine Hansberry was an American playwright, and the first African-American woman to see her play perform on Broadway. Her best-known work, A Raisin in the Sun, depicts the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.
In 1951, Hansberry joined the staff of the black newspaper Freedom, edited by Louis E. Burnham and published by Paul Robeson. Hansberry also wrote about being a lesbian and the oppression of gay people.
Marie Dorval, née Marie Amélie Thomase Delaunay, was a French stage actress.
She collaborated in the writing and starred in her lover George Sand's play entitled Cosima, in 1840. In their time, they were called 'the inseparables' and their letters have since been published.
"On Monday, morning or evening, in the theatre or in your bed, I simply must come and kiss you my lady or I shall do something crazy”, George Sand, in a letter to Marie Dorval, dated March 1833.
