Harry Watkins (actor)

Harry Watkins (January 14, 1825 – February 5, 1894) was an American actor, diarist, playwright and theatre manager, whose career spanned the latter half of the nineteenth century.

[7] Watkins played such roles as Edward Middleton in The Drunkard, Wool in his own adaptation of The Hidden Hand, and Titus in Brutus by John Howard Payne.

[13] The complete thirteen volumes of the original manuscript of the diaries are held as part of the Skinner Family papers at Houghton Library, Harvard University, which has digitized and made them available online.

The project, A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century American Actor, aims to shed new light on pre-Civil War theatre culture and the experiences and conditions of artists during that period.

[15] Watkins is fictionalized in the Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York, in a scene where The Five Points Mission presents a dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.