was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on this date in 1915. The following is taken from a longer piece at The Writer’s Almanac:
He was a child prodigy. He started reading Shakespeare when he was three years old, and he had a role in Madame Butterfly the same year. While he was still in high school, he co-authored a textbook on Shakespeare that sold twenty thousand copies.
By the time he was sixteen he had been accepted to Harvard, but instead of going there he went off to Ireland, bought a donkey and a cart, and traveled around the country painting. When he got to Dublin he was completely out of money; he later said, “I guess I could have gotten an honest job, as a dishwasher or a gardener, but I became an actor.” He posed as a professional actor from New York to get a job at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, and it was there that he made his acting debut, at the age of sixteen.