In 1960, when Mercedes de Acosta published her tell-all memoir Here Lies the Heart revealing her affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Great Garbo, Ona Munson, and Isadora Duncan, none was an angrier, exposed ex than the English/French/Danish actress Eva Le Gallienne. They had a five-year affair, beginning in 1920 when Eva was 21 and making a splash on Broadway, and Mercedes was 27. Four years after being outed by that book, Eva was given a special Tony Award, celebrating her 50th year of acting and her extensive theater work, founding and sustaining several rep companies. In 1977 she won an Emmy for playing Fanny Cavendish in George Kaufman's comedy The Royal Family, and in 1980, she became the world's oldest Oscar nominee in acting for her role in Resurrection starring the also- nominated Ellen Burstyn. She died of natural causes at 92. Six years later her record was broken when 87 year-old Gloria Stuart was nominated for Titanic.
Author of the cult favorite comedic novel How I Paid for College
[Kindle
] and its sequel Attack of the Theater People
[Kindle
], Marc Acito hasn't published a new book since 2008, so what did he do all of 2012? In March, the Old Globe in San Diego premiered his and Jeffrey Stock's musical adaptation of A Room with a View. In April, he won a Helen Hayes Award in Washington DC for his play about gay penguins, Birds of a Feather. In September, the premiere of his musical Allegiance, starring George Takei and Lea Salonga as Japanese-Americans held in US internment camps during WWII, broke the all-time box office record at the Old Globe. And in December, he saw the premiere run of his one-man-monologue-with-songs adaptation of How I Paid for College. A former opera singer, Marc sometimes performs singing commentaries on NPR. He is married to Floyd Sklaver and lives in New York City, of course.
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