LUCILLE LORTEL Biography - Actors and Actresses

 
 

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LUCILLE LORTEL

Name: Lucille Lortel                                                               
Born: 16 December 1900                                                             
Died: 4 April 1999                                                                 
                                                                                   
Lucille Lortel (December 16, 1900 – April 4, 1999) was an American actress and   
theater producer who is remembered as the namesake of an off-Broadway playhouse     
and theatrical award.                                                               
                                                                                   
Born Lucille Wadler in New York City, Lucille Lortel was originally an actress     
during the 1920s (she once recollected comparing breast sizes with Helen Hayes).   
She went on to become an off-Broadway theater producer and impresario with the     
help of a wealthy husband, industrialist Louis Schweitzer, whom she married in     
1931. Her age was a well-kept mystery until nearly the end of her life.             
                                                                                   
Lortel founded The White Barn Theatre at her estate in Norwalk, Connecticut in     
1947.                                                                               
                                                                                   
It is for her that both the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street in         
Greenwich Village, New York City, and the Lucille Lortel Awards for achievement     
in off-Broadway productions are named.                                             
                                                                                   
She died of natural causes in New York at the age of 98 and is interred at the     
Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.