Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse is in the Huntington Collection in San Marino, CA. McPherson won a prize for a scholarly essay, Tragic Pallor and Siddons, published in the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies. McPherson’s central idea is that media-based celebrity, of the kind now filling the air around us, originated with portraits of Siddons and other stars of the London theatre by Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, etc. Joseph Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed the 1950 Bette Davis film, All About Eve, used a Siddons portrait as part of the story of rival actresses and referred to a fictional Sarah Siddons Society. In response, a Chicago group of theatregoers set up a real Sarah Siddons Society and to this day gives an annual award to a leading actor.

Source: National Post June 02, 2017 19:18 UTC