Helen Hayes

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.

If you rest, you rust.
Helen Hayes

When I was attending the State College of Iowa (now the University of Northern Iowa) I had a conversation with Miss Hayes. She was there to perform some scenes from Shakespeare and I was a member of the College Players. I will never forget the gracious way she answered this college kid's question. I think I fell a little in love with her then and I still revere her as the greatest actress of our time. Sorry Meryl.

Helen Hayes (October 10, 1900 – March 17, 1993) was a two-time Academy Award-winning American actress whose successful and award-winning career spanned almost 70 years. She was one of the nine people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award.

Long regarded as "the First Lady of American Theater," Helen Hayes earned international esteem and affection during a career that spanned more than eighty years on stage and in films, radio, and television. As a screen actor she won two Oscars, as a stage actor she won a prestigious Drama League of New York award, and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan presented her with the National Medal of Arts. Deeply in love with her profession, Hayes enjoyed playing a variety of roles, from Amanda Wingfield in Tennesse Williams's "The Glass Menagerie" (1948) to a little old lady stowaway in AIRPORT (1970). Both the charm of her comic roles and the depth of her tragic ones made Hayes one of the most respected and beloved American actors.

Born in 1900 in Washington, D.C., Helen Hayes Brown spent her childhood working in the theater at her mother's urging. She made her Broadway debut at nine in "Old Dutch", inspiring one critic to call her "the greatest leading lady of her size we have ever seen." Her roles grew as she did, culminating with leading parts in "Dear Brutus" (1918) and "Bab" (1920). "I was the youngest star the New York stage ever had," said Hayes, reflecting on the triumphs and pressures, "and it darn near wrecked me." Eager for a change from these "flapper" roles, Hayes starred in a 1928 production of George Bernard Shaw's "Ceasar" and "Cleopatra". Her reviews were mixed, but for one theatergoer, the playwright Charles MacArthur, Hayes was an unqualified success. They married later that year while Hayes triumphed in "Coquett "and MacArthur reigned with his play "The Front Page". Their first child, Mary, was born a year and a half later and the couple subsequently adopted a son, James (who would follow in his mother's footsteps, becoming a well-known actor as Danny "Danno" Williams on the television show HAWAII FIVE-O).

In 1993, at the age of ninety-two, Helen Hayes died in her Nyack, New York home. Her career had brought her around the world and into the hearts of generations of Americans. She received the highest accolade of the theatrical community when Broadway's Fulton Theatre was renamed the Helen Hayes Theater in her honor. By the time of her death, she was one of only a handful of actors who had achieved such a high level of public renown and respect from her peers. Downplaying decades of achievement and praise, Hayes offered a modest summation of her career, saying, "I just always wanted to do the very best I could."

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You can read more about her here, here and here,