McClintic its director. McClintic directed the three-hour play with a meticulous attention to period detail. The play opened first in Cleveland, then played in Buffalo before reaching New York in January 1931. Brooks Atkinson wrote of opening night: After a long succession of meretricious plays it introduces us to Katharine Cornell as an actress of the first order. Here the disciplined fury that she has been squandering on catch-penny plays becomes the vibrant beauty of finely wrought character.... By the crescendo of her playing, by the wild sensitivity that lurks behind her ardent gestures and her piercing stares across the footlights she charges the drama with a meaning beyond the facts it records. Her acting is quite as remarkable for the carefulness of its design as for the fire of her presence.... The Barretts of Wimpole Street is a triumph for her and the splendid company with which she has surrounded herself. All other critics were uniform in praise of her acting: using adjectives such as superb, eloquent, exalted, dark, rhythmic, luminous, haunting, lyric, ravishing. Dorothy Parker, known for her caustic wit and unsentimental reviews, wrote that although she did not think it a good play, she "paid it the tribute of tears." Further, "Miss Katharine Cornell is a completely lovely Elizabeth Barrett.... It is little wonder that Miss Cornell is so worshipped; she has romance, or, if you like better the word of the daily-paper critics, she has glamour." The play ran for 370 performances. When it was announced that it was closing, the remaining performances sold out and hundreds were turned away. The play's success engendered a revival of Robert Browning's poetry, and cocker spaniels became the popular dog that year. Irving Thalberg wanted Cornell to play her part in an MGM adaptation, offering that if she was not completely satisfied with the result, the film would be destroyed. She refused. The movie that was released had most of the original cast, and Thalberg's wife, actress Norma Shearer, played the part of Elizabeth. Cornell refused to act in movies because she had seen audiences laugh at the acting of old movies and did not want that to happen to her. According to biographer Tad Mosel, "she did not feel that she was acting for historians or nostalgia fans of the future but for audiences of the here and now, people who came into the theatre tonight, sat in