Robert Whitehead (theatre producer)

Robert Whitehead
Born(1916-03-03)March 3, 1916
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
DiedJune 15, 2002(2002-06-15) (aged 86)
Pound Ridge, New York, U.S.
OccupationProducer
Years active1947–2002
Spouses
Virginia Bolen
​
​
(m. 1948; died 1965)​
​
(m. 1968)​
Children2

Robert Whitehead (March 3, 1916 – June 15, 2002) was a Canadian theatre producer. His first production was Medea, starring Judith Anderson and John Gielgud, and he won the Outer Critics Circle Award five times.[1] He was nominated for 19 Tony and Drama Desk Awards, winning 4 Tony Awards and 5 Drama Desk Awards.[2][3][4]

Life

His father owned textile mills, and his mother, Selena Mary LaBatt Whitehead, was an opera singer. (The actor Hume Cronyn was Whitehead's cousin on the LaBatt side.)

He went to Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, then worked as a commercial photographer before studying acting at the New York School of the Theatre.

He spent the Second World War years as an ambulance driver in North Africa and Italy.

Whitehead had a long-term association with fellow producer Roger L. Stevens. In 1964, the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre opened with Robert Whitehead and Elia Kazan as its heads and Harold Clurman as literary adviser.

In 1968, Whitehead married Zoe Caldwell, who starred in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. (His first wife Virginia, an antique dealer whom he married in 1948, died in 1965.) The couple bought property in Pound Ridge, a mountain area in New York State, and built a house there. Caldwell, who won a Tony as Brodie, later appeared for Whitehead in a revival of Medea (with Judith Anderson as the nurse), Lillian, a one-woman show about Lillian Hellman, and Terrence McNally's Master Class, in which she played Maria Callas.

Honours

2002 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.[3] The Commercial Theater Institute gives an annual award for "Outstanding Achievement in Commercial Theater Producing" which is named for Robert Whitehead.[5]

Broadway Productions

Awards and nominations

Notes

  1. ^ Outer Critics Circle Awards
  2. ^ a b c Robert Whitehead at the Internet Broadway Database
  3. ^ a b The American Theatre Wing Tony Awards
  4. ^ DramaDesk.org retrieved January 26, 2015
  5. ^ Commercial Theater Institute
Archives at
LocationLibrary of Congress
SourceRobert Whitehead papers, 1947-2002
How to use archival material