Pursuing your dream- The interesting life of Yvonne Lynn

by Joni Johnson

Yvonne Lynn joined RVM in December of 2019, just a few months before Covid hit our campus and the world.  So she is not as well known here as might be if life had been normal.  Here, she is an avid birder, a member of the Southern Oregon Land Conservancy and loves to garden.  She is 91 and looks like she is still in her seventies or younger.  She equates that with never having been married and never having children to give her gray hair.  I am sure there are many here who could relate one way or another to that statement.

So if living her dream now is birding and gardening, what was it before?  She was a New York stage actress.  She said she started acting while playing Santa in the first grade. She was always the performer for the family.   In high school in Ukiah, she played a variety of parts including those in musicals because of her soprano voice.  At Santa Rosa Junior College she had the lead in “Down in the Valley” by Kurt Weil.  While her dream was acting, good sense and a push from her family had her graduate with a degree in Liberal Arts and a knowledge of typing.

Afraid of pursuing her dream but inspired by the thought of travel, Yvonne spent many years working as a typist/secretary while working in Japan and Germany.  During this time, she sang with the army bands and any other singing group that would include her.  She also performed in a play in Heidelberg which took her to Paris for three weeks in April.  So she kept her hand in performing but only as a sideline.

Finally, Yvonne decided that it was time to get on with it if she wanted to pursue an acting career.   If she wanted to act, she needed to start acting.  She went to San Francisco and spent four years working in every theatre she could.  After a while, she was so well known that the theatre critic of the San Francisco Chronicle asked three different artists to paint her picture and the results were used as a spread in the Chronicle.  She was a big fish in a little pond.

At last, she decided it was time to go to New York.  So in 1960, she headed off  to ake roles in summer stock that offered her a chance to become part of the actors guild and have an actor’s equity card.  After that, she experienced the life of most actors- unemployment, part-time secretarial work, auditions, and successes in the theatre.  It also included acting classes and lots of parties for enjoyment and making those all important connections.

She performed in two off-Broadway productions in the early sixties, “The Boys from Syracuse” and “Streets of New York”.  In addition, she was in a myriad of other summer and winter stock productions all along the eastern seaboard from Maine to Florida.

Her favorite roles were those that used all of her abilities and experiences.  These most notably include “Night of the Iguana” by Tennessee Williams in Maine where she played Hannah, the young artist that helps the defrocked priest reexamine his life.

“It was the role that Deborah Kerr played in the movies and I got a fantastic review,” she recalls.  Although Yvonne had never painted, she found an artist who was vacationing on the island where they were performing who wanted to paint the cast. Yvonne was able to watch her paint until she felt very comfortable with the gestures when she was on stage. Her other favorite role was a two character play “I do I do” based on “the Four-poster” in Pennsylvania. It took the actors from their teenage years into their sixties and again she got to use all of my life experiences to create the character.

In 1963-64, Yvonne performed as Lady Anne (understudy to Guenevere) in Camelot as it did an 8-month tour largely in the Mid-west and the South.  She was in South Bend when President Kennedy was assassinated.  The management had to decide if the troupe should perform the play that night.  They chose to perform and had a very large audience.  But, as she said, “it was a bitter sweet experience since Kennedy was so associated with Camelot.” She also worked and traveled with a children’s theatre.  “It was fun being the ugly stepmother in Cinderella where I could be as mean as possible- something I didn’t get to do in real life.”

Unfortunately, the price of realizing a dream also has its drawbacks.  While you may have a home you call your own, you are often not in it.  So you are paying rent and asking people to keep an eye out for your belongings or renting it out yourself. “People told me I had a lot of guts,” she says.   When you are driven by something like acting and theatre, it is so compelling when you are actually working.  I loved being on stage and portraying other people. “Being insecure about my finances and my next job was the part that finally got to me.  You can only do that for so many years. And so as one gets older, having a steady income becomes even more important. It was emotionally distressing. And so finally, after 14 years of living the life of the New York actress and gypsy, I finally said, Yvonne, you’ve got to stop and get a regular job.” She stopped performing in 1974 but  lived in Manhattan for for a total of 25 years.

With her background in secretarial work, she finally worked steadily. But when she quit acting, she started directing.  I ran a play reading group at a local church and then we would put on performances. I loved directing.  It’s like teaching,” she recalls.  “You are teaching people how to be real and honest and how to relate to others on stage.  We did plays like “our Town” or “the Crucible” but the church required it to be no longer than an hour presentation.  So I had to take a play and cut out all sorts of scenes to keep it to an hour.  It wasn’t easy.”

Yvonne finally retired in 2000 and with her social security and her pension from Actors Equity, she was able to live a comfortable life.  The rest of her life has included lots of travel, Natural History and as I said before, gardens and lots of birds. Welcome, Yvonne Lynn.