The Understudy

Ellen Tovatt Leary spent twenty years acting on the professional stage. She performed in theaters from the Ahmanson in Los Angeles to the State Theater in Lincoln Center, including four Broadway theaters (the Barrymore, the Lyceum, the Helen Hayes, and the Palace), and many Off-Broadway and regional theaters. She worked with Hal Prince, Maureen Stapleton and James Hammerstein among others. She graduated from Antioch College and was a Fulbright scholar at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Her first book, a memoir, Mother Once Removed, details her childhood growing up on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village in the 1940s with an eccentric, divorced mother.She was a staff writer at Carnegie Hill News in New York for fourteen years and has published short stories as well as poems. A native New Yorker, she currently resides with her husband in LA.