Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,349

This is the grave of Dion Boucicault.

Born in 1820 in Dublin, Ireland, Dionysius Lardner Boursiquot grew up in a wealthy Anglo-Irish (read colonialist) family. That they were Protestants could go without saying. But there was one issue–he was the result of her mother having an affair and she even named the boy after him, Dionysius Lardner, the Irish mathematician! Lardner admitted the boy was his and gave money to support him. Eventually, Boursiquot’s mom left her husband for Lardner and they moved to London. He attended a bunch of different schools and he started to get interested in drama and writing. I am not sure when Boursiquot became Boucicault, but it did at some point.

Now, Boucicault was going to apprentice with his biological father as a civil engineer, but he hated it and so left to become an actor, I can only imagine the disgust of his parents. But he managed to start getting his own plays performed and published and started having real success. His first really big play was London Assurance in 1841. I don’t know this play but it is important enough that it occasionally gets revived in London to the present. That meant a very successful career was ahead, although again, I don’t know this work at all. Among his plays during the following years include Old Heads and Young Hearts (1844), The School for Scheming (1847), Confidence (1848), and The Corsican Brothers (1852). The last is another important production that he wrote for the actor Charles Kean and that was a hugely successful melodrama that ran for many years. Boucicault always acted a little bit and he started taking the lead in his own plays, starting with The Vampire (1852), in which his performance was praised even if the play itself was seen as a minor one.

In 1854, Boucicault decided to move to the United States. He and his partner ran Wallack’s Theater in Washington for awhile, then went to New Orleans and New York. He continued to have a lot of success. In 1859, he premiered the play that he is most remembered for in the U.S. The Octoroon. This was an anti-slavery play in which a rich guy comes from Europe to Louisiana and falls in love with a very white woman who happens to be 1/8 Black and a slave. It does not end well in the American version, though in the British version, the couple got together at the end. Incidentally, this is the play that evidently created the word “mashup,” which is interesting trivia. The play was quite popular, second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the antislavery genre.

Not surprisingly, The Octoroon became the perfect source material for silent film adaptations. There is a lost 1909 version with Guy Coombs and Marguerite Courtot. There’s a 1912 version as well, about which nothing seems to be known except it was directed by a guy named George Young. There is a 1913 version retitled The White Slave (of course!) with Clara Kimball Young and Earle Williams. Doesn’t seem to be anything after 1913. But adaptations of his plays into short silents remained pretty common through the 1910s, though much less after that after directors began to tell more fully-fleshed out stories, often original, with real screenplays.

Boucicault returned to England in 1860 after breaking with his American partners over some financial stuff. He immediately started putting on material, particularly The Colleen Bawn, which premiered in New York in 1860 but which he quickly adapted to the London stage and which was extremely popular in both nations. Success after success happened after, including Arrah-na-Pogue, an Irish story from 1864, and The Shaughraun, another Irish story in 1874. While Boucicault was not particularly great with money–always investing in new theaters, new plays, etc., he made so much from these plays to remain financially secure. He went back and forth from New York to London during these years, working most of the time. But in 1885, he left his wife for another woman while on tour in Australia. The marriage was falling apart anyway, but they were not yet divorced and he was called a bigamist. She took him for most of what he had and got a lot of the money from his later plays. Good for her. They had a bunch of kids too, several of whom ended up with pretty good acting careers of their own.

Boucicault’s last play was not a success. A Tale of a Coat premiered in 1890 in New York but closed a month later. He died shortly after, at the age of 69.

Dion Boucicault is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other 19th century playwrights, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Ezra Kendall is in Cleveland and Archibald Clavering Gunter is in The Bronx. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.