American Acting Dynasties

Don B Wilmeth

In 1979, a film produced about the 19th-century outlaw gang led by Jesse and Frank James and their ill-fated robbery attempt of the First National Bank at Northfield, Minnesota in 1876, featured siblings in the portrayal of related gang members. Two of the groups of brothers, the Carradines (Keith, Robert and David) and the Keaches (Stacy and James) are progeny of well-established actor fathers, John Carradine and Stacy Keach, Sr. The Quaid brothers, Randy and Dennis, are currently prominent young actors in today's theatre (they appeared together in Sam Shepard's True West in New York) and both have had major film and television roles in the mid-1980s.

If the average theatre/film goer today were asked to name the family acting dynasties in contemporary show business, the Carradines or the Fondas or perhaps the Bridges would come readily to mind. None of these, however, has established their reputations primarily as stage actors -- and none has the mystique of a Barrymore family, the centerpiece of this conference, or fall into the small category of contemporary exceptions such as the Red-graves, with representatives well-known in Great Britain and the United States.¹

Although this conference is focusing on the Drew-Barrymore dynasty, it is appropriate to offer for the following papers a context for this phenomenon in the form of a broad overview of theatrical dynasties in the history of the theatre, with some emphasis on several of the best known dynasties in the history of the American theatre.²

¹ In 1988, three years after this conference, Natasha Richardson, film actressdaughter of Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson, has become thefifth generation of Redgraves in the theatre.

² The text of this presentation is essentially the same as the one delivered tothe general audience of non-specialists in 1985. I have taken the liberty ofadding in the notes sources which appeared after this date. The originalpaper was based on a sizable number of standard sources, some of which willbe noted at appropriate points in the essay. In recent years several notableand extremely useful guides to sources on actors have appeared and these forma major resource in the study of actors. Foremost among these is Stephen M.Archer's American Actors and Actresses: A Guide to Information Sources