1868 Birthday of master actor George Arliss, who stars in a series of historical vehicles, including the dramas Hamilton and Disraeli.
1957 Laurence Olivier is The Entertainer. John Osborne's drama exposing the final turns of a song-and-dance man plays at London's Royal Court Theatre.
1968 Joel Grey is George M! The Michael Stewart, John Pascal, and Francine Pascal musical about the life of showman George M. Cohan runs 427 performances. Joe Layton choreographs and directs.
1974 The Other Place is inaugurated by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is dedicated as a space for developing new scripts and experimental versions of classics. One of the newer works of the season is Mike Leigh's Babies Grow Old.
1974 Actor Patricia Collinge dies at the age of 81. She was one of the original performers in The Players, the acting troupe founded by Edwin Booth. In 1939, she starred opposite Tallulah Bankhead in The Little Foxes.
1980 A Broadway revival of Paul Osborn's Morning's at Seven opens at the Lyceum Theatre, gets surprise rave reviews, and goes on to run more than 500 performances and win Tony Awards for Best Revival, Best Director (Vivian Matalon), and Best Featured Actor (David Rounds). The cast includes Maureen O'Sullivan, Teresa Wright, Nancy Marchand, Elizabeth Wilson, and Gary Merrill.
1995 Diamonds are Broadway's best friend once again as a revival of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes opens at the Lyceum Theatre. The Jule Styne musical based on the novel by Anita Loos returns to the stage with KT Sullivan as Lorelei Lee.
2000 In London in 1965, three one-act plays by Noël Coward played under the title Noël Coward's Suite in Three Keys. On Broadway in 1974, the show (minus one play) became Noël Coward in Two Keys. Tonight, Hayley Mills, Judith Ivey, and Paxton Whitehead open Off-Broadway in Noël Coward's Suite in Two Keys at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.
2003 Broadway gets to "Be Italian!" again as a revival of the Maury Yeston-Arthur Kopit musical Nine, opens at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Antonio Banderas leads a cast of more than a dozen women, including Chita Rivera, Laura Benanti, Jane Krakowski, and Mary Stuart Masterson. The production wins the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical.
2010 Dixie Carter, the stage and television actor who played the tempestuous and fiercely dignified Julia Sugarbaker for seven seasons on television's Designing Women, and carved out a late career as a nightclub singer, dies at age 70. Her Broadway credits included the roles of Melba Snyder in Pal Joey, Maria Callas in Master Class, and Mrs. Meers in Thoroughly Modern Millie.
2011 Aaron Tveit is a young con man with the golden touch in Catch Me If You Can, the new musical by Hairspray songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman and playwright Terrence McNally that opens at the Neil Simon Theatre. Jack O'Brien directs a cast that also includes Norbert Leo Butz, Tom Wopat, and Kerry Butler.
2012 A new production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night opens at the West End's Apollo Theatre. Directed by Anthony Page, it stars David Suchet as James Tyrone, Laurie Metcalf as his wife Mary, and Kyle Soller and Trevor White as their sons Edmund and Jamie.
2014 Bullets Over Broadway, based on the 1994 film comedy about an aspiring playwright who gets a shot at the big time when a wealthy gangster takes a sudden interest in producing, opens on Broadway at the St. James Theatre. Zach Braff and Marin Mazzie star as playwright David Shayne and stage diva Helen Sinclair. Susan Stroman directs and choreographs.
2015 Judith Malina, the co-founder, with her husband Julian Beck, of The Living Theatre, and a central figure in the New York avant garde theatre during its most vital time, in the 1960s and '70s, dies at age 88.
More of Today's Birthdays: Edith Day (1896-1971). Max Von Sydow (1929-2020). Loni Ackerman (b. 1949). Laura Bell Bundy (b. 1981). Harry Hadden-Paton (b. 1981). Alexandra Socha (b. 1990).
