On the Fame-Adjacent Virginia Hammond

A brief squint today at the life of stage and screen actress Virginia Hammond (Louise Shumate, 1893-1972).

Hammond was born into an old Virginia Huguenot family; the original spelling of Shumate was De La Chaumette. Her father Major Thomas Jackson Shumate, served in the Confederate Cavalry, and died shortly after her birth. Hammond was born and raised by her mother in Oskaloosa, Iowa. According to this 1908 article in The Des Moines Register, Hammond attended classes at local Penn College (now William Penn University), then Miss Blood’s School of Oratory, and Hinshaw’s Dramatic School, both in Chicago. Impressed by her talent, her teachers arranged an audition for her with no less than E.H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe, who were in town at the time. And this is how Hammond, not yet fourteen years old, wound up on Broadway in John the Baptist (1907). Her stage name is cobbled together from the State of her ancestors, and her mother’s maiden name.

Interestingly, Hammond’s mother had died when the girl was about eleven. It would be logical to assume that some relative, guardian or chaperone was guiding her education and early immersion into the theatre business. That may be recorded someplace. If so, I have not yet come across the information. At any rate, at quite a young age, Hammond became a Broadway star. She remained with Sothern’s company for his revivals of Our American Cousin (1908) and Richelieu (1909). From here she went into the original production of Arsene Lupin (1909-1910), followed by The Arab (1911) and What the Doctor Ordered (1911).

In 1911 Hammond married a man named Earl Edward Grady. The time period of their union roughly corresponds to a brief retirement on Hammond’s part. In 1915 she gave birth to a son, Charles Edward Grady (who later changed his name to Charles Edward Hammond). We know that she had returned to Chicago by this point because not only was the baby born there, but she also began acting in silent films produced by the Chicago-based Essanay Company in 1916, which led to other films by Vitagraph and Famous Players. By the following year she had divorced Grady and returned to Broadway in What’s Your Husband Doing? with Hale Hamilton, Alice Lloyd, and Jed Prouty.

The peak of Hammond’s career seems to have been the years 1919-1920, during which she starred or co-starred in a half dozen feature films and two Broadway plays. The films included The World to Live in with Alice Brady, The Crook of Dreams with Louise Huff, The Hand Invisible with Montagu Love, The Battler with Earl Metcalfe, Miss Crusoe with Rod La Rocque (all 1919) and A Manhattan Knight (1920) with George Walsh. The plays were Tumble In (1919) with Charles Ruggles, and The Famous Mrs. Fair (1919-1920) with Blanche Bates and Maude Allen.

At this stage, Hammond made the unusual decision to leave films and concentrate entirely on a stage career. I say unusual because at the time she left the movies she was routinely getting top or second billing. It may have been that the theatre was offering a better salary. She had a five year old son to think of. Whatever the reason, she stayed away from films for a decade, acting on Broadway in Desert Sands (1922) with Edmund Lowe, Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird (1923), The Harem (1924-25) with Lenore Ulric, and Top O’ The Hill (1920).

Hammond returned to the screen when talkies came in. Her first sound film Anybody’s Woman (1930) has her fifth in the billing underneath Ruth Chatterton, Clive Brook, and others. This was a promising beginning. She was 37 by this point, old then for an actress, so she was now a supporting player. Her roles in films over the next half dozen years ranged from bit parts to second leads, often as society ladies. Some of the better remembered pictures she appeared in were Chandu the Magician (1932), The Cabin in the Cotton (1932), Torch Singer (1933), Great Expectations (1934), Mae West’s Goin’ to Town (1935), Walter C. Kelly’s The Virginia Judge(1935), and Romeo and Juliet (1936), her last film.

Hammond was lured back to Broadway, and this last stretch of her career was truly charmed. She played Mrs. Kirby in the original production of You Can’t Take it With You (1936-38), followed by a role in the original production of The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939-41), as well as the wartime Winged Victory (1943-44), and the 1947 revival of Craig’s Wife (1947) by George Kelly. By then in her fifties, she seems to have retired for good after that.

Hammond was best friends with Edna May Oliver, and is said to have been beside her when she died in 1942. Hammond spent her own last years in Washington, D.C.