Booth, Junius Brutus

Junius Brutus (1796-1852), an English actor. After winning a reputation in Shakespearian tragedies in the Covent Garden Theater, London, he toured the United States, and finally settled down with his family at Baltimore. He was an unusually successful Iago, Shylock, and Hamlet, though Richard III was his favorite role. Several of his children have been noted actors.

John Wilkes Booth, his oldest son, was a bitter upholder of the Confederate cause. At the close of the war he formed a plot against the life of President Lincoln, whom he shot with a pistol during a performance in Ford's Theater, Washington, April 14, 1865. In jumping from the balcony he caught his spur in a curtain and fell, breaking his leg. He escaped from the building, however, and fled on horseback into Virginia, where, on the 26th, he was discovered and surrounded in a barn. On refusing to surrender, he was shot by the military.

The fourth son, Edwin Thomas Booth, who died in 1893, succeeded his father in reputation as a Shakespearian actor. He made and lost several fortunes. He lost a million dollars in building and operating a theater in New York City, but cleared $600,000 in a single season, 1876-77, in California.

See Lincoln