HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

Katharine Cornell & Guthrie McClintic Residence

New York, New York, New York

Marker Inscription

Katharine Cornell 1893-1974 Guthrie McClintic 1893-1961 The award-winning stage actress and her director husband lived here from 1921 to 1952. Their collaborative efforts grew into a production company whose Broadway shows included The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1931), also performed for the U.S.O. during WW II; Romeo and Juliet (1934); The Three Sisters (1942); and The Constant Wife (1951).

Erected by Historic Landmarks Preservation Center

The Story

From 1921 to 1952, the acclaimed stage actress Katharine Cornell and her director husband Guthrie McClintic made their home here, building a creative partnership that reached across the Broadway stage. Their production company mounted celebrated shows including The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Romeo and Juliet, and The Three Sisters, and toured for American troops through the U.S.O. during World War II. Together they helped define the golden age of the American theater.

Why it matters

The house honors one of Broadway's most influential creative couples and an actress hailed in her day as the 'First Lady of the American Theatre.'

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

The story here belongs to the first half of the twentieth century, when New York was the undisputed capital of the American stage. Broadway in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s was not a tourist attraction so much as the beating center of the nation's culture, and the people who made theater there were celebrities of the highest order.

The neighborhood, tucked east of Midtown near the river, was the kind of quiet, dignified enclave where artists of means could live away from the glare of the marquees. It offered privacy and calm within walking distance of the very world its residents commanded — a retreat for people whose working hours were spent under stage lights.

Those decades framed a golden age of the American theater. Live drama had not yet ceded ground to film and, later, television as the country's dominant entertainment. A great stage actor could be a household name, and a serious Broadway production was a national event. This was the world in which the couple who lived here built their life and their work.

People & events

Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic made their home here from 1921 to 1952 — she the award-winning actress, he the director, two careers braided into one shared enterprise. Their marriage was also a professional partnership, and out of it grew a production company that put their names on some of Broadway's most talked-about shows.

Among those productions was a celebrated staging of The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1931, a role so identified with Cornell that she carried it to American troops overseas through the U.S.O. during the Second World War. There was a Romeo and Juliet in 1934, a Three Sisters in 1942, and a Constant Wife in 1951 — a body of work that ranged from Shakespeare to Chekhov to modern comedy.

What that list really records is a rare kind of creative marriage. One partner shaped what audiences saw from the stage; the other shaped it from behind the curtain. For three decades this address was the private base from which their public collaboration was launched, again and again.

Its place in the American story

The idea of the actor-manager — a performer who not only starred but chose the plays, shaped the productions, and carried the financial risk — is central to the history of the American theater, and this household embodied it. To mount your own productions was to claim artistic control at a time when that independence was hard-won.

Cornell was hailed in her day as a leading lady of the American stage, and the reach of the couple's work extended well beyond a single city. Touring productions carried serious drama to audiences across the country, and their wartime performances for service members turned theater into a form of national morale. Culture, in their hands, traveled.

A home like this one honors more than two careers. It marks the domestic engine room of a great creative partnership, and it reminds us that behind the institution of Broadway stood particular people, living particular lives, in particular rooms not far from the stages they filled.

If you visit

This is a marker to seek out on a quiet walk rather than a grand destination, and that suits it. The pleasure is in the contrast: a hushed residential street that was once home to two people at the very center of a loud and dazzling profession.

Stand a moment and picture the ordinary domestic life behind the plaque — the scripts read at the kitchen table, the plans laid for the next season, the walk to and from the theater district. A house tells you something a marquee cannot: that even the biggest careers are lived, day to day, at a single front door.

Pair the visit with a stroll along the nearby riverfront and, if your trip allows, an evening at the theater itself. Seeing a show after standing here gives the whole outing a satisfying shape — the private world and the public one, joined the way they were in this couple's life.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · Katharine Cornell
  • · Guthrie McClintic

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