Max Figman

Biography

Max Figman first stepped into the gas-lit wings under Augustin Daly, then migrated to Charles Frohman’s troupe and the fabled Madison Square Garden Stock Company, sharpening a craft that would span six decades. For seven seasons he stood opposite the indomitable Mrs. Fiske—directing and starring as her leading man—slipping into Becky Sharp’s schemer, the inconvenient Mrs. Hatch’s uneasy host, and every brooding Ibsen hero she demanded. In 1913 the camera found him: Theodore Wharton cast him opposite Burr McIntosh in the cliff-hanging serial *The New Adventures of J. Rufus Wallingford*, with Figman’s nimble villain Blackie Daw forever scheming and, in a neat bit of life-imitates-fiction, his wife Lolita Robertson playing opposite him. His final Broadway bow arrived in 1932, when he doned the powdered wig of Louis XV in *The Dubarry*, capping a stage career that had begun when horse-drawn hansoms still lined the curb outside the theatres. Figman died at 85 in Edgewater Rest nursing home, survived by his wife and their son, Max Jr.—a quiet curtain fall for an actor who had already lived a hundred lifetimes in the spotlight.