Sylvia Short blew the roof off the Center Stage Theater in her 2017 performance as Elizabeth Bishop in Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth. Her participation in the fundraiser for Center Stage was her final triumph in a long and distinguished career in theater and film. She was ever a Shakespeare aficionado, unparalleled storyteller, and singer of Irish songs, and she loved Santa Barbara and its ocean.
Born in 1927 in Concord, Massachusetts, Sylvia attended Smith College, studying acting with Hallie Flanagan Davis; after graduating, she trained on a two-year Fulbright at the Old Vic Theatre School in London. On her return to the States, she studied with Uta Hagen, winning the Barter Theatre Award, bestowed by Fredric March, in 1952, after which she toured the country with the Barter performing repertory, the first of her many Shakespearean roles that of Portia in The Merchant of Venice.
In The Taming of the Shrew, she played Kate opposite Fritz Weaver, her fellow Barter Theatre Award winner; he became her leading man in real life. They married and moved to New York to begin their careers on the New York stage in 1954. In 1956, Sylvia was cast as Regan in Orson Welles’s production of King Lear; Welles was so bowled over at her audition that he offered her the role on the spot.
