GILLETTE, WILLIAM HOOKER, Ameri can playwright and actor, was born in Hartford, Conn., on July 24, 1855, the son of former United States Senator Francis G. Gil lette and of Elizabeth Daggett (Hooker) Gillette, a descendant of one of the town's founders. As a boy he displayed histrionic talent, planning and building scenery and miniature stages, and giving marionette shows. He graduated at the Hartford high school, but soon afterwards defied parental objection to a theat rical career by becoming utility man in a stock company in New Orleans. Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), a neighbour and close friend of the family, intervened for him, and he became a member of John T. Raymond's company. His first appearance was on Sept. 29, 1875, in Faint Heart Ne'er Won Fair Lady, at the Globe theatre in Boston. While in Boston Gillette studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at Boston uni versity, and at Harvard, and later, when working in New York, he studied at New York university. After experience in stock companies in Cincinnati, 0., and St. Louis, Mo., he appeared in the title role of his own play, The Professor, at the Madison Square Garden theatre, on Oct. 29, 1881. After that, except for his heralded appearance in Samson, Diplomacy, The Admirable Crichton, A Successful Calamity, and Dear Brutus, he has acted exclusively in plays of his own making. Held by the Enemy, the first successful play about the Civil War, was produced in Brook lyn on Feb. 22, 1886. It was followed by A Legal Wreck, a play of a New England coast town (Aug. 14, 1888) . All the Comforts of Home (March 3, 1890), Mr. Wilkinson's Widows (March 3, 1891), and Too Much Johnson (Oct. 25, 1894), were all amusing comedies; as were Because She Loved Him So, Clarice, and others of less importance. But Gillette's most successful character is that of a "cool resourceful man of action," and it is the plays in which this character appears portrayed by him that have been most suc cessful; for instance, Held by the Enemy; Sherlock Holmes, first put on in New York on Nov. 6, 1899, and in London on Sept. 9, 1901 ; and Secret Service, first played in Philadelphia, May 13, 1895, staged in London and Paris in 1897, and revived in New York in 1915-16.
See J. B. Clapp and E. F. Edgett, Plays of the Present (1902) ; Norman Hapgood, The Stage in America, chap. iii. (19o1) and A. H. Quinn's Representative American Plays (1917, 1923) .