THE WOMAN BEHIND THE “TONY”: April ‘97 American History Feature

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The Woman Behind the 'Tony'

BY JOSEPH GUSTAITIS

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Broadway’s Tony Awards; few who tune in to watch the gala event will know the story of actor/director Antoinette Perry, for whom the award is named.

Each Spring, members of the acting profession and related disciplines are honored by their peers with awards that have come to symbolize the highest achievement in motion pictures or on the Broadway stage. Given the long history of the theater in New York City–a production of Richard III was mounted in a theater on Nassau Street in 1750–one might expect that Broadway’s Tony® Awards* had a longer tradition than Hollywood’s Oscars. The fact is, however, that the movie industry instituted the Oscars in 1929, when the new art form was barely a quarter-century old; the first Tony was not awarded for another 18 years. After almost two centuries, it was, by 1947, definitely time for the theater to recognize its own.

The statues presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are not actually named for anyone. For the first two years of their existence, they had no designation beyond “Academy Awards.” The nickname “Oscar” originated, so the story goes, when a secretary at the Academy gazed at the bald figure and exclaimed, “Why, he reminds me of my Uncle Oscar.”

A real person did, however, inspire the Tony. When actor and director Antoinette Perry died in 1946, her loss was so deeply felt on Broadway that conventional eulogies seemed inadequate; a permanent memorial would be necessary. And so the following year, the Tony Award was born.

Mary Antoinette Perry was born in Denver, Colorado, on June 27, 1888, the only child of lawyer William Russell Perry and his wife Minnie. Antoinette was enthralled by the stage at an early age. “I had an interest, for as long as I could remember, in theater,” she told an interviewer in 1935. “Why, when I was a child, I didn’t say, as most children do, that I was going to become an actress. I felt that I was an actress and no one could have convinced me that I wasn’t! I had wanted to act since I was six. There was a special urgency in my case, for an aunt had married an actor–something that wasn’t looked on with much favor in those days.”

Her aunt was the actress Mildred Hall, and when Antoinette was on vacation from Miss Wolcott’s School in Denver, she would travel with Hall and her husband, George Wessells, on cross-country tours. Wessells–who had, he said, once played on the same stage as the great American Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth–encouraged Antoinette’s talent and urged her to study the literature of the theater. Before long, she was staging plays on the lawn in front of her home.

But William Perry deemed the acting profession unsuitable for his only child. Less opposed to her having a musical career, he sent Antoinette to Miss Ely’s School in New York to study voice and piano. Although she did not continue in music professionally, she was later regarded by her theatrical peers as a fine pianist, and that instrument remained a cherished source of recreation and comfort for the rest of her life.

With the help of her aunt and uncle, the stage-struck teenager made her acting debut in Chicago on June 26, 1905–the eve of her seventeenth birthday–in Mrs. Temple’s Telegram. That same work served as the vehicle for Antoinette’s New York debut, which took place at the Madison Square Theatre later that year. In 1906, she again played in New York, in a work called Lady Jim, and though that production did not long endure, one critic called her “the sweetest, most piquant ingénue in Broadway.”

Between 1906-09, Antoinette appeared in New York productions of The Music Master and A Grand Army Man. In the latter, she starred opposite the celebrated actor/director David Warfield, of whom she once said: “I really learned from David. What a terrific actor he was! With David, there was always that sense of something struggling to break through. He makes me see what acting is.”

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