Archer, William
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Theatre.
(1856-1924) Scottish critic, translator and playwright, an important reformer of the near-moribund English theatre through his translations of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), through his critical essays assembled in Masks or Faces? (coll 1888) and elsewhere, and through his alliance with George Bernard Shaw. He is of minor sf interest for a late play, The Green Goddess: A Play in Four Acts (performed Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1920; 1921), a Lost Race melodrama set in a Shangri-La-like enclave in South America, where an intruder (played by Ronald Colman [1891-1958], who reprised a similar role in the film Lost Horizon) crashes his airplane, and is wooed there with promises of Immortality and (decorously) Sex. The play was adapted by Louise Jordan Miln as The Green Goddess (1922); after a silent film release, it was filmed as The Green Goddess (1930). [JC]
William Archer
born Perth, Scotland: 23 September 1856
died London: 27 December 1924
works
- The Green Goddess: A Play in Four Acts (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1921) [play: hb/]
links
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