The Crocker Family:

A Dynasty on Stage and Screen

A Ridgefield harness-maker and a Ridgefield farmer’s widow joined in marriage nearly 200 years ago and wound up beginning what was to be a small dynasty of 19th and 20th Century actors and actresses.

But just who was William Crocker and how did he and his wife Anna manage to create two of the 19th Century’s better-known actresses — one of whom became the mother and grandmother of more actors, including a movie star knighted by the King of England?

What we know of William and Anna Crocker is based on old and sometimes confusing and conflicting records. William was baptized in 1790 in New Haven, a twin son of Daniel and Anna Crocker. His father was a Presbyterian minister who later served congregations in Pound Ridge, Redding and New Fairfield.

In 1814, when he was 23, and living in Ridgefield, William Crocker married Maria or Almira (records use both names) Dauchy, a member of an old Ridgefield family. Historian Silvio Bedini describes him as a harness-maker who worked at the Big Shop, a factory on West Lane where the First Congregational Church is today. He belonged to St. Stephen’s Parish, and served on a committee that led repairs to the aging church building then in use.

However, various sources, including obituaries of his daughter Elizabeth, describe him as a clergyman. He never served in that capacity in Ridgefield, and  no record of his being a minister elsewhere in the area could be found. In the index to his “History of Ridgefield,” George L. Rockwell lists three references to “Crocker, Rev. William,” but none has anything to do with religion. 

William had a son named William Austin Crocker. A William A. Crocker was serving as a minister in New Fairfield in the 1850s, long after our William had died. Perhaps the son was confused with the father.

William Sr. lived in Ridgefield most, if not all of his adult life, died in Ridgefield in 1835 at the age of 45, and is buried in Ridgefield.

He and Almira/Maria had four children. She died in March 1824 and by that August, William had married the widow Anna Smith of Ridgefield. He was 33, she 31. The minister who performed the ceremony was the Rev. Daniel Crocker, William’s father. 

Anna or Ann Seymour was born in Ridgefield and had first married Czar Smith, a Ridgefield farmer. He died in 1817, aged 28 — “his death was caused by a severe cold taken while hunting foxes,” says a genealogy.

William and Anna had five children together, including daughters Elizabeth, born in 1830, and Sarah, born in 1833.

Some accounts say Elizabeth was born in Ridgefield, others say Stamford. Most accounts say Sarah was born in Ridgefield.

Both became well-known, professional actresses in New York and London.

Elizabeth Crocker made her acting debut at the age of 15, performing in New York City’s Park Theatre as Amanthis in a play called “The Child of Nature.” She went on as a teenager to do many roles on the stage.

In 1847, at the age of 17, she married David P. Bowers, a popular actor from Philadelphia, and throughout nearly a half century on the stage, she was usually known as “Mrs. D. P. Bowers.”  David died 10 years after they were married. A few years later, Elizabeth married a Dr. Brown of Philadelphia, and he, too, died. Late in life she married actor J. C. McCullom, with whom she had  performed for many years. He died five years before her.

Mrs. Bowers appeared chiefly on stages in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, and was also involved in managing several theaters. Her roles in the 1850s were described by The New York Times as “the high-born, sympathetic ladies of the romantic drama, the tearful heroines of tragedy, and the coquettes of old comedy.”

In 1861 she appeared in London at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre and later at the Lyceum.

“Mrs. Bowers acquired a good deal of money and retained her vogue for many years,” The Times said in her obituary. “In the winter of 1879-80, she and Edwin Booth toured and starred together. She continued to appear on the New York stage until her death in 1895 at the age of 65. 

Her younger sister, Sarah, was also an acclaimed and popular actress. She made her debut in Baltimore  in 1849, at the age of 16, and went on to play several leading parts as a teenager. 

In May 1852, she married the actor Frederick B. Conway, and thereafter, the two often  appeared together in plays. Like her sister, she performed for a while in England, including at the Sadler's Wells Theatre in London. After she and her husband returned to America, they went on an extensive — and The Times said “profitable” — tour of American stages. 

In 1864 Sarah acquired and managed the new Brooklyn Theatre, where for nine years her husband played leading parts; some have called the operation the first stock company in America. 

“Sarah Conway possessed a tall and graceful figure and an expressive countenance, and was a versatile actress and a popular theatre manager,” said one theater historian.

She died in 1875.
Sarah was the mother of actress Marianne "Minnie" Conway, born around 1852, who has become better known as the mother of two major actors than as a stage personality. Minnie died in 1896, leaving behind sons, Frederick Conway Tearle and Godfrey Seymour Tearle. 

Born in 1878 in New York, Conway Tearle, as he was known, started his career in the 1890s on the stages of America and Great Britain. “His big break came at the age of 21 when in Manchester, England, without any preparation, he was called upon to play Hamlet after the lead actor took ill just prior to the first act,” said a 1916 biography.

In 1910, he began playing in silent movies and by the 1920s, “he became the highest paid male film actor for several years,” The Times said in his obituary. He played alongside such stars as Mary Pickford in silent films and then moved into “talkies.” In all he appeared in more than 100 movies.

He continued to perform on both stage and screen until his death in 1938 at the age of 60.

Though born in New York City, Conway’s brother, Godfrey Tearle, grew up in England, and wound up specialized in portraying what a biographer called “the quintessential British gentleman” on the stage and in both English and American films. 

He started out a Shakespearean actor. “He has been described as the greatest Othello of our time,” The Times said.

After four years  in the Royal Artillery in World War I, he resumed his stage career but also started making motion pictures. He appeared in more than three dozen silent and sound movies, including portraying Professor Jordan in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps” in 1935. 

He was also active in the profession, helping found the British Actors Equity Association and serving as its president for 10 years.

In 1951, King George VI knighted Sir Godfrey Tearle for his contributions to the British theatre.

His last film role, playing a bishop in “The Titfield Thunderbolt,” was in 1953, the year of his death at the age of 68.

Godfrey’s middle name was Seymour, which no doubt harkened back to his great grandmother, born Anna Seymour, the Ridgefield woman who began this dynasty in the 1830s. One wonders whether the family held her in some sort of special regard as an inspiration for her two daughters who went into the theater. Certainly, there was some magic somewhere in the Crocker-Seymour clan of Ridgefield.

Jessie Royce Landis: 

Mother to the Stars

“I am probably one of the most prolific mothers out there,” said Jessie Royce Landis in a Ridgefield Press interview in 1966, the year she moved to Old Branchville Road.  “But I am lucky enough to have children who are doing nicely and give me no trouble.” 

Those “children” included Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, June Allyson, Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins, Jean Peters, and Kim Novak. 

Miss Landis played mother to all of them in Hollywood films. As a stage and screen actress for 50 years, she was often cast as a mother, but also played countless other parts with the likes of Noel Coward, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Ray Milland, and Ingrid Bergman. Among the best-known

films she appeared in were Alfred Hitchcock’s two classics, To Catch A Thief and North by Northwest, both starring Cary Grant. She was only eight years older than Grant when she played his mother in the latter.

Born Jessie Medbury in Chicago, Ill., in 1896, she began her career on the stage, performing in plays ranging from Shakespeare to modern comedies. She wound up on television, where she appeared in scores of shows – often as a mother. One of her roles was as Madame Olga Nemirovitch in The Man from U.N.C.L.E, a popular TV series that starred Robert Vaughn, who also made Ridgefield his home.

Miss Landis was also a writer who penned several comedies for the stage. She detailed much of her life in her autobiography, “You Won’t Be So Pretty, But You Will Know More,” about which one critic wrote: “It’s a pity it is true. It would make such wonderful fiction.” 

Miss Landis, whose husband was Army Major General J. F. R. Seitz, died in 1972 and is buried in Branchville Cemetery.

Jolie Gabor: 

A Chance to Play

Jolie Gabor, the colorful mother of the even more colorful Gabor sisters — Eva, Magda and Zsa-Zsa, considered her home in Ridgefield a quiet retreat compared to her places on Long Island and in California. "I only get a chance to play bridge in Ridgefield because the social life is so busy in Southampton and Palm Springs," Ms. Gabor once said. 

She was born Janka Tilleman in Budapest in 1900 — her wealthy parents, wanting a boy, called her Jansci or “Johnny.” She became a socialite, musician and actress and, in 1936, age 35 and married, was selected Miss Hungary. She operated several jewelry stores in Budapest in the late 1930s, but fled the country when the Germans invaded.  

She came to the United States in 1945; when she arrived she had only $100 and a diamond ring. However, she was hardly without means — daughter Zsa Zsa, who arrived earlier, was married to Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate. With Zsa Zsa’s help, she established a Madison Avenue jewelry business that thrived off the reputations of her increasingly popular and marriage-prone daughters. (One of the saleswomen at her store was Evangelia Callas, mother of future opera diva Maria Callas.)

At one point, among mom and her three daughters, the Gabors had had 21 husbands. Actor George Sanders was married to both Magda and Zsa Zsa and was attracted to Jolie. “You know, Jolie,” he once wrote her, “I think marriage is for very simple people, not great artists like us.” Zsa Zsa, on the other hand, observed of Sanders: “When I was married to George Sanders, we were both in love with him. I fell out of love with him, but he didn’t.”

With the help of professional writers, she produced two books, Jolie Gabor, a memoir, and Jolie Gabor’s Family Cookbook, a collection of Eastern European recipes.

In 1966, Jolie and her then husband, Count Odon de Szigethy, bought a modest home on Oscaleta Road and immediately set about glamorizing the place. “I like to make from a nothing something,” she told The Ridgefield Press. 

The de Szigethys sold the place in 1970 and Ms. Gabor died in 1997 in California at the age of 96.

Gene H. Ellis: 

Actress Turned Writer

Gene Ellis was talented on the stage, on the ice and on the typewriter. The former actress was for many years a writer of several of the most popular “soap operas” on television.

Born Gene M. Hufeisen in Seattle, Wash., in 1933,  she spent much of her childhood in Fairbanks, Alaska, where her father had a construction company. She began ice skating as a grammar school student. She also studied dance with a young man named Donald Saddler, who at the time was serving in the U.S. Army in Alaska, but who later became a Tony Award-winning choreographer for both Broadway and Hollywood.

She returned to Seattle to complete her high school education, and continued to study both skating and dance, but ultimately decided to pursue the latter. She majored in drama at the University of Washington, but quit after a year to move to Europe to work on her acting and dancing. She dubbed films in Rome and studied dance in Paris.

Ellis moved to New York City in 1953 to pursue her theatrical career. After winning dancing roles in summer stock, she made her Broadway debut in the Josh Logan production of “Wish You Were Here.”

Her husband, Ralph, noted that the production was “complete with onstage swimming pool — she lied about not being able to swim so she wouldn’t have to get wet eight performances a week.”

She then joined the national tour of the musical “The Boy Friend.”  She danced many major roles in summer stock, “always to critical acclaim,” said Ralph, who had been a fellow actor; they met and married in 1961.

Returning to New York City, she acted in several off-Broadway shows, including a   revival of Shaw’s “Buoyant Billions” and “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” and became a featured performer in both winter and summer stock, appearing with such actors as John Raitt and Howard Keel. 

She also appeared on television in the 1957 musical special of “Pinocchio” with Mickey Rooney and Walter Slezak, and a year later she used her skating talents in the TV musical special, “Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates” with Tab Hunter and Dick Button.

In 1963, she retired from  acting and dancing — in her final performance, in the Paper Mill Playhouse production of “West Side Story,” she was two months pregnant.

By 1964 Ralph had also stopped acting and had turned instead to a career as a full-time writer of daytime television dramas. After the birth of their third child, the Ellises moved to Ridgefield in 1972 where their fourth  child — Ridgefielder Catherine Ellis Dulecki — was born. 

That same year, her husband persuaded Gene to try writing scripts.

“Gene was always interested in writing,” Ralph said. “She wrote a weekly column for the Washington University paper when she was student there.  It was humorous in tone and had a large readership, including a female student, who wrote her ardent fan letters.  Needless to say, the fan was taken aback when they met and she discovered ‘Gene’ was a girl.” 

In high school, she had won first place in a Seventeen Magazine contest for a short story that was subsequently published in the magazine.

Together with Ralph, and also separately, Gene wrote under the name Eugenie Hunt.  

The Ellises wrote for many years in the 1970s and 80s for “As the World Turns,” the second

longest-lived of the television soap operas — started in 1956, it ran 54 seasons until 2010 (only The Guiding Light ran longer, by three years). For several years, they were the head writers on the show, which over the years had featured such budding young actors and actresses as Meg Ryan, Julianne Moore, Parker Posey, Matthew Morrison, Martin Sheen and James Earl Jones.

They also wrote many episodes of  “Search for Tomorrow,” a show that ran from 1951 to 1986. In all, Gene wrote nearly 500 episodes of the program. Among the future stars who appeared on ‘Search’ were Morgan Fairchild, Susan Sarandon, Jill Clayburgh, Kevin Bacon, Lee Grant, Sandy Duncan, Kevin Kline, and Wayne Rogers.

She and her husband were also head writers for “The Doctors.”  On her own, she wrote scripts for “Loving,” “One Life to Live” and “General Hospital.”

Having both acted professionally was an advantage for the Ellises. “An acting background is a tremendous help in writing scripts,” Ralph said. “While some might be total failures at novels, which require descriptive passages, actors are very adept at improvisation and transfer that ability to creating dialogue. The best writers we ever hired were actors.”

When her daughters, Catherine Dulecki and Susan Ellis, were teenagers, their parents sometimes sought their help. “They would often ask me and my sister to read a line or two and tell them if it sounded like something a teenager would say,” Catherine recalled.

Both young women also got a chance to be a part of a show.  “In 1984, my sister and I were in an episode where Jermaine Jackson and a relatively unknown Whitney Houston performed a concert in the fictional town of Oakdale on ‘As The World Turns,’” Catherine said.

Their brothers, Steve and Tom Ellis of Ridgefield, were also on “As the World Turns.”

In 1974  the Ellises won a Writer’s Guild of America award for best daytime show, “Search for Tomorrow.” In the years that followed Gene was also nominated for the Writer’s Guild Award for her work on “One Life to Live” and “Loving.”

Gene Ellis retired from writing in 1994, but remained active locally as a member of the Caudatowa Garden Club and volunteering at the Keeler Tavern Museum.  

The couple had been married for 55 years when Gene died in October 2016 at the age of 82.

Over the years, the Ellises were often asked where they got their plot ideas. “We never used Ridgefield experiences in any direct way, although the tranquility of living here certainly provided a more comfortable creative atmosphere than our years in New York City,” Ralph said.  “Since we didn’t know any murderers, blackmailers, amnesia victims, and only a few adulterers, we made them up.” 

Kay Young Eason: 

Actress Who Missed the Battle

Kathleen Young Eason, an actress who was a friend of some of England’s greatest theatrical figures, was better known locally as a pillar of her church and garden club. A longtime Ridgefielder,  Eason acted on the British stage, a half dozen movies and later became a costume designer for RKO in Hollywood. She had been married to actors Michael Wilding, Douglass Montgomery, and Myles Eason.

A native of England who was born in 1912, Kay Young began her theatrical career as a student at the Guildhall School of Music where she had hopes of becoming an opera singer. “I was a lyric soprano, but I was very tall and decided I couldn’t be a great, fat opera singer,” she said in an interview in 1989, adding that she was five feet, ten inches tall when she was 13.

While still a student, she auditioned for a part in an opera being produced by Australian actor Cyril Ritchard, who was to later live in Ridgefield and be a major catalyst in her life. She did not win the part — “Cyril looked at me and said, ‘You’d be much too tall, taller than me!’ ” — but was picked as an understudy for a major role.

She then turned to acting and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Her first break was a part in a Beatrice Lillie revue which, despite receiving poor notices, had a long run because of its star.

She was in various productions during the 1930s and early 1940s, performing with such stars as David Niven, Stewart Granger, Jill Esmond, and Sir Laurence Olivier.

In the late 30s, she met Michael Wilding at an audition, and the two were married in 1939. They later divorced, and he married actress Elizabeth Taylor.

It was in the 1930s that Kay Young met Olivier, then a young stage actor, and the two became longtime friends. “I knew Larry through the theater and was in one flop with him,” she said. “He had even then a commanding presence and remarkable voice. And he had a devastating sense of humor.”

When he was making “Henry V,” Olivier invited many of his friends to a 12th Century abbey he and his wife, Vivien Leigh, owned in the country. Only after they had arrived and settled in did he

tell his friends he wanted them to perform in what was to be the famous Battle of Agincourt scene that would be shot there.

“We sat on those bloody great horses which we mounted in the stable and the horses were to back out. Mine wouldn’t back and when Larry say, ‘Where's Kay?’ I said, ‘I'm here in the stable.’ He gave my horse a tremendous whack, it shot out of the stable, and I fell off. Then my horse wouldn’t move. So I was never in the Battle of Agincourt.”

Kay Young did appear in a number of British movies, including Noel Coward’s Academy Award-winning film about World War II, “In Which We Serve.” 

During World War II, she entertained the troops in North Africa, sharing a tent with Vivien Leigh. “We traveled as soldiers, and many an hour I spent under tanks and trucks and I was scared.”

In 1944, she was sitting in front of a fireplace in a London apartment building when it was hit by a German V-2 rocket. “The building collapsed,” she recalled. “All the windows were blown out and I was drawn halfway up the chimney. My arms were burned…”

The same year, she began studying at the London School of  Fashion Design, and started designing for movies. Her work for films brought her to RKO in Hollywood in 1950.

In 1953, a year after her divorce from Wilding, she married actor Douglass Montgomery, whom she had met in London at the end of the war.  Montgomery had become a Hollywood star, but also did   television plays in New York City. She appeared in at least one film, “Woman to Woman,” with him.

She eventually became a successful interior decorator, living in New York. She and her husband decided to move to New England and in 1965, moved to a home on Golf Lane. A year later Montgomery died.

In 1968, she was at a party at the Ridgefield home of Cyril Ritchard (perhaps best known for his portrayal of Captain Hook in the famous 1954 TV production of Peter Pan). There she was introduced to another actor from Australia, Myles Eason, who had met her many years earlier at the Chelsea Arts Ball in London.

“Who is that girl?” Mr. Eason had asked Laurence Olivier at the ball. “I’m going to marry her some day.”

And six months after they were reunited in Ridgefield, the two were married. 

In Ridgefield, Mrs. Eason was active in St. Stephen’s Church. She was a frequent lector and for a long while, was head of the lectors. She also worked each year at the Nutmeg Festival, the church’s fair. Both she and Myles were gardeners; she was a member of the Ridgefield Garden Club and he was an honorary member. For many years, she maintained the plantings in the watering trough triangle at the intersection of West and Olmstead Lanes.

Kay Eason died in 1994 at the age of 81. Myles Eason died in 1977.

Hilda Spong: 

A Star of the Stage

Famous in her era as a talented and glamorous actress, Hilda Spong quietly lived her final years in Ridgefield. At the end, she was, alas, the subject of one of the most embarrassing typographical errors ever to appear in The Ridgefield Press.

The stage was in Hilda Spong’s blood. Born in 1875 in London, England, Spong was the daughter of Walter Brookes Spong, a landscape artist who was also well known as a stage scene painter for theaters in England and later Australia, where he moved with his family in 1886. 

Her long career began in Australia in 1890, when she was 15, and she soon moved to London. She was on the New York stage by 1898. Over the next 40 years, she performed professionally in more than 50 major productions on three continents, but mostly on Broadway. She specialized in comedy, but was equally adept at tragedies and melodramas. She was also in a couple of silent movies, and one 1933 “talkie.”

Spong was noted for being a “beauty,” a term she is said to have disliked. Nonetheless, The San Francisco Call said in 1901, reporting that she was about to appear on the stage there for the first time, “You never knew a beauty who didn’t want to impress you with the idea that she was all brain, just as the clever women long to be deemed beauties — New York has said that Miss Spong is plenty of both.”

A painting of Spong by noted Australian artist Tom Roberts is in Australia’s National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, where a video describing it is titled “Who the devil was Hilda Spong?” Suggesting she was the Cate Blanchett or Nicole Kidman of her day, the narrator says “she had the fame, the fans, the glowing reviews, the scandals, and the love affairs.” 

Spong was also painted by America’s acclaimed artist William Merritt Chase; that life-size, full-length portrait belongs to the Virginia Museum of Art in Richmond.

Around 1935, Miss Spong moved to 19 Main Street, a house she called Maplewood; it’s on the west side of the street just north of Wilton Road West.  She retired from the stage a few years later.  

“She was a versatile artist whose arduous training had included everything from Shakespearean tragedy to inconsequential comedy,” The Ridgefield Press said in her 1955 obituary. “Because she was professional in her attitude toward acting, she continued to study singing and rarely spent a day without reading Shakespeare.” 

In an unfortunate typo, that front-page obituary was headlined, “Hilda Spong, Stag Star, Dies at 81.”