At 90, Rollins College’s Annie Russell Theatre shines bright
Actress turned stage fame into action
Some historic spots seem to have little connection to the folks whose names they bear. But Annie Russell remains a real presence at the jewel box of a theater named for her at Winter Park’s Rollins College. She graced the stage herself in its opening production in 1932, and some say she’s still there, a benign spirit for whom a balcony seat is reserved at each performance.
Ninety years after its founding, the venue called “the Annie” is the oldest continuously operating theater in Florida. It began with a woman who was much more than just a famous name over the door, says Thomas Ouellette, Rollins’ director of theater. Annie Russell rolled up her sleeves and did the work. Fame and typecasting
Born in 1864, Russell did bring immense fame with her to Winter Park. She “was the Julia Roberts of turn- of-the-century melodrama,” notes Chelsea Hilend, Rollins’ associate director of theater. “She was America’s — and Britain’s — sweetheart.”
While still in her teens, Russell became known in New York and beyond for her delicate beauty in ingénue roles. In 1881, she enjoyed one of her greatest successes in the play “Esmerelda,” by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who would go on to write “A Little Princess” and “The Secret Garden.”
The plot concerned a winsome farm girl, played by a teenage Russell, who falls in love with a rugged neighbor in spite of her ambitious mother’s objections. Of course, love triumphs. Audiences adored the play, which enjoyed one of the longest runs of its era.
Russell did get some chances to break from the melodramatic mold. In 1905, she originated the title role in George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara” in London, and the next year, she appeared on Broadway as Puck in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” delighting audiences as she appeared to fly through the air. She was 42 years old.
“I have been conventional for so long, and this is such a delightful escape,” she told one interviewer.
Still, producers mostly wanted to keep casting Russell as a waifish ingénue — the kind of part for which she had first become well known. “She’d had her fill of that,” says Ouellette, and disparaged such roles as “Annie-genues.”
Renaissance in Winter Park
Russell also had troubles in addition to typecasting, including illnesses and two unhappy marriages that ended in divorce. She announced her stage retirement in 1918 and in the 1920s moved from New Jersey to Florida, eventually to Winter Park, where she bought a Mediterranean-style home at 1426 Via Tuscany. (Sadly, the 1926 home known as the Annie Russell House was razed in 2005.)
Without her lifelong profession, Russell was at loose ends, until her longtime friend Mary Curtis Bok diagnosed the problem and came up with a solution: a gift to Rollins of $100,000 to create a theater where Russell could work again
and undertake a new act late in her life.
“With this theater Miss Russell hopes to bring to the students of Rollins College and the people of Florida the highest artistic examples of the drama,” the Orlando Sentinel reported at the building’s dedication in early 1932.
For its first production that spring, Russell returned to the stage after 14 years in a performance of Robert Browning’s “In a Balcony,” playing not an ingénue but a mature woman. And she did more than act. “She wanted to be the chair of the department, and she wanted to shape the early curriculum of the department, which she did,” says Ouellette.
Unfortunately, Russell didn’t have a long tenure. Plagued by illness, she died in 1936. But her influence and sense of professionalism have lasted. “She set the bar really high. There is a seriousness of purpose she brought that we still retain,” says Ouellette.
Russell’s legacy also includes traditions that are “hugely important to our students,” says Hilend. At the start of the school year, senior students welcome incoming ones by taking them around the theater and “telling them the stories,” she says. “It’s taken seriously, the passing down of the lore.”
Part of the lore is that Annie’s spirit still resides in the theater. “We save a seat for her for every performance, in the balcony. That’s where she liked to watch the shows when she was working here,” says Hilend.
She’s not a scary spirit. “There’s something a little nerve wracking about going on stage when you’re a college student, and the fact that there’s this benevolent presence watching them from up in the balcony really pays off for them,” says Ouellette. “After rehearsal when they’re leaving for the night, they say ‘Good night, Annie’; they’re sort of saying it to the building, but really they’re saying it to her.”