the play, a view adopted by directors and critics ever since. Reviews were ecstatic and audiences responded in kind. The Actor's Theatre changed its plans and decided that Cornell's name must appear above the play's title in all future productions of the troupe. Another acting troupe, the Theatre Guild, controlled the rights to all Shaw's plays, and thereafter allowed only Cornell to play the role of Candida so long as she was alive, a role which she reprised several more times in her career. Shaw later wrote her a note stating that she had created "an ideal British Candida in my imagination." Cornell's next role was to play Iris March in The Green Hat (1925), a romance by Michael Arlen. The play had themes of syphilis and loose morals, and Iris March was a strong sexual creature. Leslie Howard played the role of Napier. While the play was still in Chicago, it became an international hit, known all over the US and Europe. Ashton Stevens, senior drama critic in Chicago, wrote that The Green Hat "should die at every performance of its melodramatics, its rouge and rhinestones, its preposterous third act.... Already, I am beginning to forget its imperfections and remember only its charms." Its chief charm, he conceded, was Cornell, who sent "tiny bells up and down my unpurchasable vertebrae." Most other critics panned the play itself, but nonetheless found it irresistible because of Cornell's ability to mesmerise, despite the garish dialogue. Critic George Jean Nathan wrote that the play was "superbly acted in its leading role by that one young woman who stands head and shoulders above all the other young women of the American theater, Miss Katharine Cornell." The Green Hat had 231 performances in New York before going to Boston and then a cross-country tour. The play's success spawned a fashion in green hats of the type worn by Cornell in the play. Later, Tallulah Bankhead played the role of Iris March in a less successful London production, and Greta Garbo played the role in a 1928 film adaptation, A Woman of Affairs. She starred in 1927 in The Letter, by W. Somerset Maugham, as Leslie Crosbie, a woman who kills her lover. Maugham himself suggested Cornell for the part. Although the critics were not too excited about the play, Cornell by then had developed a loyal following. The opening night was such a sensation that