Tennessee Williams Photo Archives - LIFE

LIFE’s Images of Classic Broadway

Bill Syken — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 19:19:30 +0000

The original run of LIFE magazine coincided with a memorable time for the American stage. Major stars—Marlon Brando, Barbara Streisand, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier— made or burnished their reputations on Broadway, while revered writers such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill debuted their signature works.

And LIFE magazine photographers were there. Gjon Mili, such a wonderful documenter of the arts, is responsible for a great many pictures here, but Gordon Parks, George Silk, Bill Ray and many others all took their swings. Their pictures capture artists at work—including actors who would later become familiar faces on television, such as Jerry Orbach (Law & Order). Angela Lansbury (Murder, She Wrote) , Barbara Bel Geddes (Dallas) and Julie Newmar (Batman).

The thrill of theater is, of course, being there. This photos are the next best thing.

Nineteen-year-old Barbra Streisand played Miss Marmelstein in the 1962 Broadway play “I Can Get It For You Wholesale.”

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Barbra Streisand, 1962.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.

Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.

Eliot Elisofon /The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A 1943 production of “Oklahoma!”

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pearl Bailey during a curtain call for the Broadway production of Hello, Dolly! in 1967.

John Dominis/Life Picture Collection/Shuttertstock

Jerry Orbach (left) and an unidentified actress in a scene from the off-Broadway production of ‘Scuba Duba,’ October 1967.

Ralph Morse/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Angela Lansbury opened on Broadway in “Mame” to a standing ovation, 1966.

Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A 1953 production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, featuring Madeline Sherwood (rear, second from left), Arthur Kennedy (right) and Walter Hampden (second from right).

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Paul Newman (left) and Geraldine Page in the Tennessee Williams play Sweet Bird of Youth, 1959.

Gordon Parks/Life PIcture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier in a scene from “Porgy and Bess,” 1959.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

ason Robards Jr. (L) and Farrell Pelly (R) in a scene from the Eugene O’Neill play “The Iceman Cometh,” 1956.

Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mary Martin and her fellow cast members soared in the 1954 Broadway production of the musical Peter Pan.

Allan Grant/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from “All My Sons,” 1947, starring Karl Malden.

Eileen Darby The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Julie Newmar, right, with Claudette Colbert in a scene from the Broadway play “The Marriage-Go-Round,” 1958.

Photo by Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Barbara Bel Geddes in the Tennessee Williams play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from Death of a Salesman, 1949, with Lee. J. Cobb as Willy Loman.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Patrick O’Neal (right) and Margaret Leighton in the play ‘The Night of the Iguana’ by Tennessee Williams, 1962.

Leonard McCombe/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hair, the original Broadway cast, 1968

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In Jesus Christ Superstar, Jeff Fenholt, as Jesus, was elevated with angels while Judas, played by Ben Vereen, was on a wing-shaped set platform.

John Olson/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

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Brando Takes Broadway: LIFE on the Set of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ in 1947

Sun, 30 Nov 2014 12:31:00 +0000

Along with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and a few other notable modern works, Tennessee Williams’ 1947 masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, helped shape the look and feel of American drama for decades to come. But nothing that occurred during the play’s original Broadway run eclipsed the emergence of a young Marlon Brando as a major creative force and a star to be reckoned with. Decades after the original Broadway premiere on Dec. 3, 1947, LIFE.com presents photos — some of which never ran in the magazine — taken during rehearsals by photographer Eliot Elisofon.

Directed by Elia Kazan and starring Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, the 1947 production remains a touchstone in American drama, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for the year’s best play, as well as a Best Actress Tony for Tandy for her seminal performance as the unstable, alcoholic, melodramatic Southern belle, Blanche DuBois. Despite all the accolades it earned, however, the 24-year Brando’s galvanizing turn as Stanley Kowalski — in both the play and in Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation — was what really seared the production into the pop-culture consciousness.

Gritty, sensual, violent and bleak, Williams’ great play remains one of a handful of utterly indispensable 20th-century American dramatic works, while the sensual ferocity of Brando’s Stanley can still shock, seven decades after he first unleashed the character on a rapt theatergoing public.

A Streetcar Named Desire 1947

Kim Hunter (left), Marlon Brando, Karl Malden and others in rehearsal for the original production of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)

Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.

Eliot Elisofon /The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.

Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Streetcar Named Desire 1947

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams on the set of Streetcar Named Desire

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Brando Takes Broadway: LIFE on the Set of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ in 1947 appeared first on LIFE.

Tennessee Williams: Portraits of an American Genius

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:07:06 +0000

While Eugene O’Neill, with his Nobel Prize and four Pulitzers, is the greatest American playwright of the 20th century, Arthur Miller the most lastingly relevant, Edward Albee the most challenging and Sam Shepard simply the coolest, one could argue that Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams III is the most influential, and his work the most universally beloved.

Putting one’s finger on why Williams’ plays have held pride of place in theater goers’ hearts for so long is another matter. Yes, the dialog is a thrilling mixture of the perfectly colloquial and the poetic. Yes, the passions on display in works like The Rose Tattoo, The Glass Menagerie and, of course, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are as blistering as those given voice by any other American dramatist, while the characters Williams brought to life remain, for many of us, as indelible as members of our own families.

In the end, though, the appeal and the power of Williams’ very best plays might reside in this: that he manages, somehow, to peel back layer after layer from his characters as the story rolls on, and rather than diminishing these men and women in our eyes, the gradually unfolding revelations and the playwright’s clear-eyed compassion for his own creations ennoble and humanize them. Stanley, Blanche and Stella; Maggie the Cat, Brick and Big Daddy; Amanda Wingfield in Menagerie and Serafina in The Rose Tattoo these and so many other Williams characters are profoundly memorable not because they’re heroic, but because they’re so deeply and recognizably flawed. They’re damaged, searching, isolated creatures and still they go on. Williams, never sentimental, sees in that simple act of endurance a quality worth celebrating. And so do we.

Here, on Williams’ 101st birthday (he was born, not in Tennessee, but in a small town in eastern Mississippi, on March 26, 1911, and died in New York City in 1983), LIFE.com offers a series of portraits of the great American playwright by some of LIFE magazine’s finest photographers: portraits of what LIFE, in 1948, called “a dreamy young man with an unconquerable compulsion to write.”

That Tennessee Williams creatively harnessed that compulsion for so many years, battling an army of relentless personal demons (alcohol, drugs, depression) every step of the way, is one more act, William’s own act, of endurance worth celebrating.

Tennessee Williams stands in front of a poster advertising his play, A Streetcar Named Desire, in New York in 1948.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams in New York in 1955.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Backstage poker with the musicians attracted Williams much more than flashy night life during his month in New York after Streetcar’s premiere.”

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams in 1948.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams, New York, 1948.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams on the set of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947.

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams at a diner in New York in 1948.

W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tennessee Williams in Mexico in 1963 during filming of a movie from his play, The Night of the Iguana, in 1963.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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