Edwin Booth
Edwin Booth was a famous American actor, most notable for his performance of Hamlet. He was also the romantically tragic older brother of John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. In one of Fanny’s final diary entries before the assassination attempt, she described a dinner where her family hosted Edwin. Fanny was quite enthralled and seemed to have a bit of a crush on the moody artist. However, similar to her trip to Ford’s Theatre, this meeting can be looked back upon as an ominous foreshadowing of the 1865 conspiracy. Just a year after meeting Edwin, Fanny’s life was turned upside down by his younger brother’s plot to change history.
“As I entered the parlor I saw across the room a small slight gentleman, with the face we had seen before on the stage. .. “Mr. Booth looks full thirty two” (that is said to be his age) “a melancholy face betraying an intensely sensitive nature, and such a quick apprehension! He has dark, long, silky hair and magnificent dark eyes–wears neither beard nor moustache. His face is very thin and handsome more from its intellect than features–He has a fine arched nose…”...Those wonderful eyes–how can they be the same they are black points in Shylock, in Richelieu they read the characters of all about & they command–in Richard they hate–in Don Caesar they flash & dance, & sparkle & smile, & kill with there brilliant beauty. In Hamlet they are so full of tenderness & sadness, that ones heart aches at the sight and Booth’s eyes are Hamlet’s eyes in their sad expression…An hour after we saw him again, not changed to another character, as on previous play nights, but, though wearing stage dress, & though fully realizing, explaining, adorning the character of Hamlet the same sad, sensitive, dignified gentleman who had just been our guest.” Mar 11, 1864
Edwin Thomas Booth, Napoleon Sarony, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution c. 1875