"Somewhere In Time" is an immensely popular romantic film about a contemporary playwright named Richard Collier (played by actor Christopher Reeves), who falls in love with an actress who was young during the early 1900s, a woman he knows only through her photograph. Collier learns of a technique through which he can use hypnosis to actually travel backwards in time. He travels seventy years into the past to be with her.
The actress from the photograph is named Elise McKenna in the film. But the character was actually based entirely on real-life Mormon actress Maude Adams.
Maude Adams was born in Salt Lake City in 1872. Her mother, a Latter-day Saint, was a leading player in Brigham Young's Deseret Stock Company, which performed at the old Salt Lake Theatre. Maude's father was a Presbyterian businessman.
In the Richard Matheson novel that the movie was adapted from,
Bid Time Return, there are two chapters focusing on the main character (Richard Collier) reading about "Elise McKenna" in a biography about her as well as in historical books about American theater. Much of the material Matheson describes in this section was taken almost directly from actual historical books and biographies written about Adams. The book's main character reads a biography titled
Elise McKenna: A Intimate Biography written by an author who was a friend of the actress: "Gladys Roberts." Of course, this was based on the actual book
Maude Adams: An Intimate Portrait, written by Phyllis Robbins.
The novel
Bid Time Return attributes to "Elise McKenna" the same career, playing the same roles in the same plays, as the actual Maude Adams. The novel even gives "Elise" the same birthday and place of birth, stating that she was born in Salt Lake City on November 11, 1867. The only change is the year of birth. Maude Adams was born in 1872, not 1867. Matheson has moved the birth of "Elise" back in time by 5 years.
Although the novel identifies Utah as the birthplace of "Elise," it never points out that "Elise" (Maude Adams) was a Mormon. It is interesting to note that the book does include one passage in which the narrator describes seeing the Book of Mormon. On page 12 (first edition) the narrator (Richard Collier, played by Christopher Reeve in the movie) is aboard the
Queen Mary (anchored off the coast of San Diego). He describes things he sees in the museum on board the ship:
More memorabilia. Dominoes. Dice in a leather cup. A mechanical pencil. Books for religious services; Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Christian Scientist--that old, familiar book. I feel as though I were an achaeologist excavating in a temple. More photographs. Mr. and Mrs. Don Ameche. Harpo Marx. Eddie Cantor. Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Robert Montgomery. Bob Hope. Laurel and Hardy. Churchill. All suspended in time, forever smiling.
Transcriptions of complete cast lists from the 1907 Maude Adams biography written by Ada Patterson can be read
here. The cast lists included in the biography, all from New York City productions, are for:
A Midnight Bell; All the Comforts of Home; Men and Women; The Lost Paradise; The Masked Ball; The Butterflies; The Bauble Shop; The Imprudent Young Couple; Christopher, Jr.; Rosemary and
The Little Minister. Note the last cast list shown, in which Maude Adams was cast as the lead actress in
The Little Minister, written by J. M. Barrie. (Barrie also wrote
Peter Pan, crafting the title role specifically for Adams.)
The Little Minister is the play that Maude Adams ("Elise McKenna") performs in the movie "Somewhere in Time." In the book from which the movie was adapted (
Bid Time Return), Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve's character) goes back and sees Maude Adams ("Elise") perform in
The Little Minister when it premiers at the Hotel Coronado outside of San Diego, California on the night of November 20, 1896. This is ten months before the actual opening of the New York City production of the play, which opened on September 27, 1897. Author/screenwriter Richard Matheson used as inspiration for his novel the actual pattern of Adams' smaller roles followed by her starring role in
The Little Minister, as seen in the Ada Patterson biography. The novel also specifically uses the New York opening of the play as a key plot point. See page 33:
What do I know about her [Maude Adams/Elise McKenna] so far? Beyond the fact that I'm in love with her, I mean?
That, up until 1897, she was outgoing, successful, proficient at acting, and fought with her manager.
That, after 1897, she became: one, a recluse; two, a total star; and, three, her manager's conception of a total star.
The transition play, if it can be called that, was
The Little Minister, the play she tried out in this hotel approximately a year before it opened in New York.
What happened during that year?
After reading the Ada Patterson biography of Maude Adams and seeing these books' cast lists for himself, author/screenwriter Richard Matheson pondered these same questions. Staying at the Hotel Coronado, he essentially cast himself in the lead role in his novel (note that his protagonist shares his first name), and he wrote
Bid Time Return to provide a fanciful, entertaining answer. What happened during that year was that a contemporary television writer (such as himself) was so captivated by the image of Maude Adams ("Elise") that he willed himself backwards in time to be with her.
