Born On This Day- August 17th... Monty Woolley

Edgar Montillion Woolley was born on this day- August 17th, in 1888, in NYC. He was a professor & lecturer at Yale University & he became an actor rather late in life, appearing on Broadway in 1936.

Woolley was typecast as the sharp speaking, supercilious sophisticate. His most famous role is the cantankerous radio personality forced to stay immobile because of a broken leg in The Man Who Came to Dinner, which he performed on Broadway, on the road, & in the film version. The play is based a on the radio & press celebrity of the 1930s & 1940s, Alexander Woollcott, who was also gay.

In the early 1970s, I performed in The Man Who Came To Dinner, a near perfect piece of theatre comedy confection by George Kauffman & Moss Hart. I played the role of Banjo, a thinly disguised caricature of Harpo Marx. In a crazy coincidence, I would play Harpo Marx a year later in a rather good musical, ready to be revived I believe- Minnie's Boys.

Woolley was a teacher & trusted sidekick of Cole Porter while at Yale & throughout their lives. They enjoyed many amusing disreputable adventures together in NYC & on foreign travels.

He played himself, badly, in Warner Brother's misinformed, misrepresented, & miserable bio-pic about Cole Porter's life- Night & Day (1946), a fictionalised retelling of Porter's peculiar professional & personal life. In the film he is much older than Cary Grant's Cole Porter, but he was actually only 3 years older than his friend.which might give you a clue about the nature of some of their audacious assignations

Woolley starred in a CBS TV adaptation of The Man Who Came to Dinner in 1954, the year of my birth. Woolley appeared in the TV series- Best of Broadway.

After finishing his final film, Kismet (1955), he returned to radio. Woolley was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor in 1943 for The Pied Piper & as Best Supporting Actor in 1945 for Since You Went Away. He won a Best Actor award from the National Board of Review in 1942 for his role in The Pied Piper.

I have it on good authority that Woolley had a passion for black men, as did Cole Porter. Bennett Cerf in his 1944 book Try & Stop Me, tells the tale of Woolley at a dinner party where he suddenly belched. A woman sitting nearby glared at him; he glared back & said: "& what did you expect, my good woman? Chimes?"  Woolley died in 1963. I could play his signature role- Sheridan Whiteside in the Man Who Came To Dinner, with my eyes wide shut.