Eugenia Rawls; Actress Who Portrayed Tallulah Bankhead

Eugenia Rawls, a theater actress who specialized in one-woman shows about Tallulah Bankhead and others, has died. She was 87.

Rawls, who was also active in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, died Wednesday in Denver of complications of pneumonia.

A native of Macon, Ga., Rawls first went on stage at age 4 in a hometown production of “Madame Butterfly.” She made her Broadway debut as a schoolgirl in Lillian Hellman’s “The Children’s Hour” and followed that with Hellman’s “The Little Foxes.”

Rawls appeared in other plum productions in New York, including “Strange Fruit,” “The Shrike” with Jose Ferrer, “The Great Sebastians” with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, “Pride and Prejudice,” “Rebecca,” Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” and Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.”

She continued acting after her 1941 marriage to Donald R. Seawell, who was Bankhead’s longtime attorney and is the founder and chairman of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Bankhead, who became Rawls’ mentor and lifelong friend when the two met in “Little Foxes,” seemed to Rawls a natural subject about whom to create a one-woman play. The result was “Tallulah, a Memory,” which Rawls developed in 1971. She introduced the performance at New York’s Lincoln Center and then took it to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. She brought the production to Los Angeles’ ANTA Playhouse (formerly the Merle Oberon Theater) in 1975, and four years later turned it into a book of the same title.

Rawls, who performed in Britain and the United States, also developed and toured two other solo shows in the early 1970s, “Affectionately Yours, Fanny Kemble” and “Women of the West.”

She published a volume of poetry, “A Moment Ago,” in 1984.

In her later years, Rawls turned to television, performing on two soap operas, “As the World Turns” and “The Guiding Light.” She also helped develop and read works of the writer Lillian Smith for a PBS show, “Lillian Smith’s Memory of a Large Christmas,” first telecast in 1996.

Rawls donated her collection of theater memorabilia to Wesleyan College in Macon, Ga. In honor of her efforts to promote performing arts in the Denver area, a new theater will be named for her on the city’s Auraria campus, which serves three educational institutions.

She is survived by her husband; a daughter, Brook Ashley of Santa Barbara; a son, Brockman Seawell of New York; a brother and sister; a granddaughter; and two great-grandchildren.