Brought 30 Plays to Broadway : Stage Producer Richard Aldrich Dies

Richard Aldrich, a producer credited with the development and perpetuation of summer theater and a biographer of his late wife, actress Gertrude Lawrence, has died while visiting relatives in Virginia, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

Aldrich was 83, lived in Massachusetts and was in Williamsburg when he died March 31.

Aldrich, a producer of more than 30 Broadway plays, including “Goodbye My Fancy,” “The Playboy of the Western World,” “The Moon Is Blue” and “Pygmalion,” staged a series of plays at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Mass. starring such future stars as Humphrey Bogart, Lloyd Nolan, Robert Montgomery and Gregory Peck. Bette Davis was an usher at the theater in her youth.

He also owned two other Massachusetts summer theaters, the Falmouth Playhouse in Coonamessett and the Cape Cod Melody Tent at Hyannis.

He met Miss Lawrence in 1939 when she tried out for “Skylark” in the Cape Playhouse, and he married her the following year. That was the same year he starred her in a revival of “Pygmalion.” After her death from cancer in 1952 he wrote the best-selling “Gertrude Lawrence as Mrs. A: An Intimate Biography of a Great Star.”

It formed part of the basis for the film “Star,” released in 1968 and starring Julie Andrews as Miss Lawrence and Richard Crenna as Aldrich.

After leaving the theater in the 1950s he became deputy director and then director of the Foreign Operations Administration in Spain, retiring in the 1960s.

Survivors include his present wife, Elizabeth, and four children.