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Back to article: NATHANIEL CARL GOODWIN (1857– )

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GOODWIN, NATHANIEL CARL (1857– ), American actor, was born in Boston on the 25th of July 1857. While clerk in a large shop he studied for the stage, and made his first appearance in 1893 in Boston in Stuart Robson's company as the newsboy in Joseph Bradford's Law. He made an immediate success by his imitations of popular actors. A hit in the burlesque Black-eyed Susan led to his taking part in Rice and Goodwin's Evangeline company. It was at this time that he married Eliza Weathersby (d. 1887), an English actress with whom he played in B. E. Woollf's Hobbies. It was not until 1889, however, that Nat Goodwin's talent as a comedian of the "legitimate" type began to be recognized. From that time he appeared in a number of plays designed to display his drily humorous method, such as Brander Matthews' and George H. Jessop's A Gold Mine, Henry Guy Carleton's A Gilded Fool and Ambition, Clyde Fitch's Nathan Hale, H. V. Esmond's When we were Twenty-one, &c. Till 1903 he was associated in his performanceswith his third wife, the actress Max'ine Elliott (b. 1873), whom he married in 1898; this marriage was dissolved in 1908.