Career as Actress
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Following the success of her play Fashion, Anna Cora Mowatt, in a complete reversal of her earlier distaste for the stage, appeared for the first time as an actress at the Park Theatre, June 13, 1845. Her debut role was Pauline in the popular melodrama Lady of Lyons. For the next eight years, she became one of the foremost popular and critically acclaimed American actresses. She specialized in ingenue roles from Shakespeare, popular melodramas, and her own plays Fashion and Armand. Poe described her onstage appearance: |
The great charm of her manner is its naturalness. She looks, speaks, and moves, with a well-controlled impulsiveness, as different as can be conceived from the customary rant and cant, the hack conventionality of the stage. Her voice is rich and voluminous, and although by no means powerful, is so well managed as to seem so. Her utterance is singularly distinct, its sole blemish being the occasional Anglicism of accent, adopted probably from her instructor, Mr. Crisp. Her reading could scarcely be improved. Her action is distinguished by an ease and self-possession which would do credit to a veteran. Her step is the perfection of grace. Often have I watched her for hours with the closest scrutiny, yet never for an instant did I observe her in an attitude of the least awkwardness or even constraint, while many of her seemingly impulsive gestures spoke in loud terms of the woman of genius, of the poet imbued with the profoundest sentiment of the beautiful in motion.
Actor E.L. Davenport joined Mowatt as acting partner in September of 1846. Mowatt wrote her second play, Armand, the Child of the People, with his and her capabilities in mind. Armand is a romantic play set in the time of Louis XV. The King tries to seduce Blanche, the daughter of the Duke of Richelieu. Armand, a soldier, falls in love with Blanche and strives to help her escape the king. Armand's defiance of the King, while hardly in keeping with the customs of the court of Louis XV, was quite in tone with the sentiments of America in 1847.
| In 1847, Davenport and Mowatt sailed for London, where they achieved great popular and critical success. However, her English career came to an abrupt halt when James Mowatt died on February 15, 1851. She might have remained in England after her husband's death, but following this tragedy, her London manager, who was in love with her, went bankrupt and committed suicide. Depressed, dispirited, and ill with another recurrence of her respiritory condition, Mowatt returned to America, July, 1851. | 
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After recovering, she resumed touring American theatres with productions of Fashion and Shakespearean comedies. During this time, she was vigorously pursued and courted by William Foushee Ritchie, son of Thomas Ritchie and editor of the Richmond Enquirer, the official organ of the Democratic party in Virginia. In December of 1853, Mowatt published her Autobiography of an Actress. On June 3, 1854, she made her last appearance on the public stage.
