the New York Sun wrote that the sidewalks were packed with people after the performance straining to catch a glimpse of her. In 1928, Cornell played the lead role of the countess Ellen Olenska in a dramatized version of Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence. Her performance received only positive reviews. After this success, Cornell was offered the lead in The Dishonored Lady. It was originally intended for Ethel Barrymore, who failed to accept the role. The play is a lurid melodrama about true-life murder in Glasgow, Scotland. Walter Winchell wrote, "Never in the history of the theatre has an actress of such distinction permitted such an exciting scene. She [Cornell] actually permits a man to crack her a powerful wallop in the face!" One critic complained about the "fifth rate claptrap" of a play, and chastised Cornell for selecting such lowbrow theater as a waste of her talents. Vogue wrote that Cornell does these types of plays because "she prefers... to be blunt, trash of a violent kind." Biographer and playwright Tad Mosel counters that although this is meant as a reproof, when stripped of its condescension, "it is a simple statement of the truth. There was a part of her that indeed preferred trash of a violent kind. Her integrity as an artist was the only defense such a preference needed. Every performance had to be as much a revelation of herself as it was an interpretation of a role, and therefore her choice of roles and the way she played them offer great insights into her nature, greater perhaps than can be inferred from her gracious, smiling, always agreeable, and increasingly guarded behavior offstage. One must look at her performances as one looks at the output of a writer or a painter." The Barretts of Wimpole Street Katharine Cornell is perhaps best known in her role as poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Rudolf Besier's play The Barretts of Wimpole Street. The play is based on the life of the poet's family; the Barretts lived on Wimpole Street in London. The play opens with Elizabeth, the oldest child of a large and loving family. Their widowed father has become embittered and determined that none of his children should marry, lest they become slaves to the "brutal tyranny of passion" and "the lowest urge of the body". His smothering concern for his family—particularly for Elizabeth, who is an