Edwin Thomas Booth (November 13, 1833 – June 7, 1893) was an American stage actor and theatrical manager who toured throughout the United States and the major capitals of Europe, performing Shakespearean plays.

However, his achievements are often overshadowed by his relationship with his younger brother, actor John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.

"[4] In early appearances, Booth usually performed alongside his father, making his stage debut as Tressel or Tressil in Colley Cibber's version of Richard III in Boston on September 10, 1849.

His first appearance in New York City was in the character of Wilford in The Iron Chest, which he played at the National Theatre in Chatham Street, on September 27, 1850.

[5] After his father's death in 1852, Booth went on a worldwide tour, visiting Australia and Hawaii, and finally gaining acclaim of his own during an engagement in Sacramento, California, in 1856.

[citation needed] In 1869, Edwin acquired his brother John's body after repeatedly writing to President Andrew Johnson pleading for it.

[citation needed] On April 23, 1879, Mark Gray, a traveling salesman from Keokuk, Iowa, fired two shots from a pistol at Booth.

Booth was playing the title role in Richard II at McVicker's Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, during the final act of the William Shakespeare tragedy.

[13] The attempted assassination occurred on Shakespeare's supposed birthday[14] and came at a time when Booth was receiving numerous death threats by mail.

[13] In 1888, Booth founded The Players, a private club for performing, literary, and visual artists and their supporters, purchasing and furnishing a home on Gramercy Park as its clubhouse.

[16]Booth did not know the identity of the man whose life he had saved until some months later, when he received a letter from a friend, Colonel Adam Badeau, who was an officer on the staff of General Ulysses S. Grant.

However, a spokesperson from the Mount Auburn Cemetery, where Booth is buried, denied reports that the family had contacted them and requested to exhume Edwin's body.

[23] The family hopes to obtain DNA samples from artifacts belonging to John Wilkes, or from remains such as vertebrae stored at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Maryland.

It was directed by Philip Dunne and stars Richard Burton and Raymond Massey as Edwin and Junius Brutus Booth Sr., with Charles Bickford as Prescott, producer of their Shakespeare tour.

The cast also includes Eva Le Gallienne, who plays Gertrude to Burton's Hamlet, and who is listed on the opening credits as "Special Consultant on Shakespearean Scenes".

In that movie, the character of Granville Thorndyke (as acted by Alan Mowbray) is an obvious nod to Booth's father Junius, and the scenes portray essentially the same sequence where the great actor has to be retrieved from a bar and dragged back to the theatre where he is overdue to give a performance in front of a restless audience.

In 1966, Martin Landau played Edwin Booth in the episode "This Stage of Fools" of the NBC western television series, Branded, starring Chuck Connors as Jason McCord.

The Brothers BOOTH!, by W. Stuart McDowell, which focuses on the relationships of the three Booth brothers leading up to the assassination of Lincoln, was workshopped and given a series of staged readings featuring David Strathairn, David Dukes, Angela Goethals, Maryann Plunkett, and Stephen Lang at the New Harmony Project,[30] and at The Guthrie Theatre Lab in Minneapolis, and later presented in New York at the Players' Club, the Second Stage Theatre, and the Boston Athenaeum.

[35] Pendleton had adapted this version from his earlier work, Booth Is Back, produced at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1991–1992 season.

The Tragedian, by playwright and actor Rodney Lee Rogers, is a one-man show about Booth that was produced by PURE Theatre of Charleston, South Carolina, in 2007.

The play is a fictionalized account of Booth's life, hinging on the personal, professional, and political tensions between brothers Edwin and John Wilkes, leading up to the assassination of Lincoln.

[37] In 2013, Will Forte played Edwin Booth in the "Washington, D.C." episode of the Comedy Central series, Drunk History, created by Derek Waters.