Tweed, Blanche Oelrichs Thomas Barrymore

▪ American writer and performer

née  Blanche Marie Louise Oelrichs,  pseudonym  Michael Strange 

born Oct. 1, 1890, New York, N.Y., U.S.

died Nov. 5, 1950, Boston, Mass.

      American writer and performer who produced poetry and plays, acted onstage, and did readings for radio.

      Blanche Oelrichs was of a well-to-do and socially prominent family. She was the reigning debutante of Newport society until her marriage in 1910 to Leonard M. Thomas, a rising young diplomat. She soon became a fervent suffragist (woman suffrage), wearing a bobbed haircut considered scandalous in that time.

      In 1914, apparently in a sudden and unprecedented inspiration, Blanche Thomas began writing poems, many of them showing the influence of Walt Whitman (Whitman, Walt). Her collection Miscellaneous Poems was published in 1916 under the name Michael Strange. She used that name for all her published and stage work thereafter. A volume titled simply Poems followed in 1919. In 1918 she adapted Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Leo)'s The Living Corpse, which was produced successfully on Broadway with John Barrymore (Barrymore, John) in the lead. On her divorce from Thomas in 1919 she began an affair with Barrymore that led to their marriage in 1920. Also that year she wrote Claire de Lune, which was presented in April 1921, starring John and Ethel Barrymore (Barrymore, Ethel).

      From 1925 to 1927 she performed on stage with a summer stock company in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1928, under the management of Elisabeth Marbury (Marbury, Elisabeth), she made the first of several successful lecture tours. She divorced Barrymore in that year and in 1929 married Harrison Tweed. In 1936 she had a poetry and music program on WOR, a New York radio station, and it soon became a regular feature, with eventually a full orchestra accompanying her readings. Her other books include Resurrecting Life (1921), Selected Poems (1928), and Who Tells Me True (1940), an autobiography.

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