Henry Churchill De Mille (1853-1893) was a playwright and dramatist who was elected to The Lambs in 1889. His sons, Cecil and William, both joined The Lambs. De Mille served on the Lambs’ Council in 1893.
DeMille collaborated with Lamb David Belasco on a series of highly successful plays, beginning with The Wife (1887) and continuing with Lord Chumley, a vehicle for E. H. Sothern, a fellow Lamb.
He was the son of William Edward and Margaret Blount Hoyt deMille, both of Washington, N.C., where young deMille was born September 15, 1853. During the Civil War his father joined the Confederate Army and the family became refugees in Greenville, N.C.. He rapidly learned the difficulties and inconveniences of life in wartime, including early education under his own mother. When peace came the family returned home, but under strained economic conditions for them and the community. In 1867 when he was about 14, deMille went to New York to visit his grandfather, Thomas Arnold deMille, who persuaded the boy’s parents to let him stay in the North. That September, at age fourteen, he entered Adelphi Academy, in Brooklyn, which was to become a strong motivating force in his life.
In 1871 deMille entered Columbia College from which he received the A.B. and A.M. degrees. Following graduation in 1875, he taught at Lockwood’s Academy, then at Columbia Grammar School. A devout member of the Episcopal church, he was a lay reader at St. Stephen’s, Brooklyn. In 1878 he was accepted as a candidate for Holy Orders in the Diocese of Long Island, though he was never ordained. Instead, he turned to the theater. His first assignment was as a playreader on the staff of the Madison Square Theatre. Through Lamb Daniel Frohman, the stage manager, he met David Belasco, with whom he developed a close friendship. They became partners after production of The Main Line (written in collaboration with Charles Barnard) at the Lyceum Theatre on 18 Sept. 1886.
By this time deMille had acquired a summer home at Echo Lake, N.J., where for the next five years Belasco practically became a member of the family. The first of their collaborations was The Wife, produced at the Lyceum on 1 Nov. 1887. This was followed by Lord Chumley, produced 21 Aug. 1888, written especially for E. H. Sothern to give Sothern a character somewhat like the Lord Dundreary his father had made famous, and The Charity Ball, produced 19 Nov. 1889. They were among the most popular plays of the period and acted for several successive seasons throughout the country under the management of Daniel Frohman, at whose Lyceum Theatre they had first been produced. The two productions gave deMille a national reputation.
His wife, Beatrice deMille, was born Matilda Beatrice Samuel in Liverpool. She immigrated with her family to New York in 1871. Though her family and friends called her Tillie growing up, when she met Henry deMille, he immediately started calling her Beatrice, after Dante’s Beatrice. According to her son, the director-producer Cecil B. DeMille, when Beatrice told her family that she intended to marry Henry, a Christian, they said they would disown her for converting from her Jewish faith. Never one to obey the rules, Beatrice married Henry deMille in Brooklyn, New York, in 1876.
To secure his success as an actor, Henry began writing plays in which he would play the lead role. Soon he formed a partnership with future theatre impresario David Belasco, and the two wrote and produced a number of theatre productions, most of which starred Henry, that were enormously successful. Henry was able to buy a large house in Pompton, New Jersey, for the three children he had with Beatrice—William, Cecil, and Agnes, who would die at age four of spinal meningitis.
At the height of his success, DeMille died of typhoid fever on Thursday afternoon February 5, 1893, at his home in Pompton.
Beatrice knew she would have to support her children. Within weeks of his death, she converted the Pompton house into the Henry C. DeMille Preparatory School for Girls. Although she was not particularly good with money, Beatrice managed to save enough to send William to Germany for an education and Cecil to a boy’s school in exchange for educating the daughter of the school’s president. To make additional money, she convinced Belasco to let her work as exclusive agent of the plays that he and deMille had written, and from there she began to represent other writers. During an era when very few women worked outside the home, Beatrice became a play broker and authors’ agent. She helped her sons, who both became hugely successful in show business and followed their late father to The Lambs.