R.I.P. Jane White

[Reza]

Jane White, New York Stage Actress, Dies at 88

By Robert Simonson

28 Jul 2011

Jane White, a stage veteran who created the role
of Queen Aggravain in Once Upon a Mattress, died
on July 24 in New York. She was 88.

Ms. White, a New York City native who grew up in
the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, attended Smith
College and the New School. She landed her first
Broadway role in the 1945 play Strange Fruit. She
would go on to act in the Broadway productions
The Insect Comedy (1948), Razzle Dazzle (1951),
The Climate of Eden (1952), Take a Giant Step
(1953), Jane Eyre (1958) and The Power and the
Glory (1958), all of which had short runs.

Her luck changed with Mattress, Mary Rodgers'
lightly comic tale of the famous fairly tale,
which began life Off-Broadway. As Queen
Aggravain, she was nemesis to the ungainly,
would-be princess played by Carol Burnett. Brooks
Atkinson called her "a queen with the evil smile
of a dragon." She repeated her work in a 1964 television movie of the musical.

Off-Broadway, she frequently appeared at Joseph
Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, where she
benefited from the producer's devotion to
color-blind casting. She won a 1966 Obie Award
for roles in Coriolanus and Love's Labour's Lost
at Central Park's Delacorte Theater, a stage she
frequently performed upon. In 1971, she was given
an Obie Award for Sustained Achievement.

In 1989, she won a Los Angeles Critics Circle
Award for her role as the Mother in Lorca's Blood
Wedding. Later New York work included Michael
John LaChiusa's The Petrified Prince at the
Public Theater in 1995. More recently, she was
one of the veteran stars who was cast in the 2001
Broadway revival of Follies, in which she played Solange LaFitte.

In 1979 Jane White starred in a one-woman cabaret
show, written by friend and librettis Joe
Masteroff, entitled Jane White, Who? "Her voice
is full of warm rich colors," wrote the New York
Times, "and she has a very positive delivery that
gives emphasis and shadings to songs that do not
always get such perceptive treatment." She
continued to perform it throughout the years. Her
films included "Klute" and "Beloved."

Jane White was born to Gladys Leah Powell and
Walter Francis White, a civil rights leader and
the national secretary of the NAACP from
1931-1955. Her childhood home was a gathering
place for prominent political and social figures. The couple later divorced.

In 1962, White met and married the New York
restaurateur Alfredo Viazzi. They moved to Europe
in 1965, but moved back to the U.S. in the late
1960s. Viazzi died of a heart attack in 1987.