Carlotta Monterey (born Hazel Neilson Taasinge; December 28, 1888 – November 18, 1970) was an American stage and film actress. She was the third and final wife of playwright

Eugene O'Neill Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Nobel Prize in Literature, literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama tech ...

. Carlotta Monterey was born Hazel Neilson Taasinge on December 28, 1888, in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

to Christian Nielsen Tharsing (middle name and last name also reported as Nielson / Nielsen and Tharsing / Thaarsing / Thaising), a Danish immigrant who was a fruit farmer and Nellie Gotchett. Abandoned by her father, she was raised by an aunt from the age of four.Lynn 1997, p. 301 After she won the title of "Miss California" in a beauty contest, she traveled to London to study acting with

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (17 December 1852 – 2 July 1917) was an English actor and theatre manager. Tree began performing in the 1870s. By 1887, he was managing the Haymarket Theatre in the West End, winning praise for adventurous progr ...

. She adopted the name Carlotta Monterey after her return to the United States at the start of World War I, and pursued a career in the theatre. She garnered disparaging reviews of her acting ability, but her beauty was much admired. Portrait of Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey O'Neill 2

Portrait of Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey O'Neill 2

She married her first husband, John Moffat, a lawyer, in 1911. They were divorced. She married secondly Malvin C. Chapman Jr. in 1916. They had one daughter, Cynthia Jane Chapman (born 1917). She got divorced again. After divorcing her third husband, the illustrator

Ralph Barton Ralph Waldo Emerson Barton (August 14, 1891 – May 19, 1931) was a popular American cartoonist and caricaturist of actors and other celebrities. His work was in heavy demand through the 1920s and has been considered to epitomize the era, but hi ...

, in 1926, she became romantically involved with

. whom she had met in 1922 when she acted in a production of his play ''

The Hairy Ape ''The Hairy Ape'' is a 1922 expressionist play by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. It is about a beastly, unthinking laborer known as Yank, the protagonist of the play, as he searches for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by the rich ...

''. They married in July 1929 in Paris.O'Neill & Estrin 1990, p. 215 She remained with O'Neill for the rest of his life, and dedicated herself to maintaining his privacy. After his death in 1953, Carlotta authorized the publication of his autobiographical play '' Long Day's Journey Into Night'', which O'Neill had instructed his publisher to withhold until 25 years after his death. The play was awarded the 1957

Pulitzer Prize for Drama The Pulitzer Prize for Drama is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It is one of the original Pulitzers, for the program was inaugurated in 1917 with seven prizes, four of which were a ...

, and is O'Neill's best known work. A resident of the Valley Nursing Home in

Westwood, New Jersey Westwood (known as "The Hub of the Pascack Valley") is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough's population was 10,908,Gent, George
"Carlotta Monterey O'Neill Dies; Widow of Playwright Was 82; Ex-Actress Shared 24 Years of Artist's Life Model for 'Strange Interlude's' Nina"
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', November 21, 1970. Accessed October 27, 2015. "Mrs. Eugene O'Neill, widow of the playwright, died last Wednesday at the Valley Nursing Home in Westwood, N.J., where she had been living since last summer." __NOTOC__

Partial filmography

*'' The Cost'' (1920) *'' Soul-Fire'' (1925)

Notes

References

*Lynn, Kenneth Schuyler (1997). ''Charlie Chaplin and His Times''. Simon and Schuster. *O'Neill, E., & Estrin, M. W. (1990). ''Conversations with Eugene O'Neill''. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
American Experience: Eugene O'Neill

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Monterey, Carlotta 1888 births 1970 deaths American expatriates in the United Kingdom American stage actresses American film actresses American silent film actresses 20th-century American actresses People from Westwood, New Jersey