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Metropolitan Opera Guild founder Eleanor Robson Belmont was born into a theatrical family in England in 1878. Her father died when Eleanor Elise was seven. Her mother subsequently brought her to America, placing her in a convent school on Staten Island while she pursued her own acting career. After graduation in 1897, Eleanor joined her mother, who was on tour with a stock company in San Francisco, where, without benefit of any rehearsal, the young woman stepped in for her ill mother in a performance of Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, and a career was born. The budding actress stayed with the Frawley Stock Company until 1900, when she made her New York debut, as Bonita in Augustus Thomas's Arizona. Her London debut came in 1904, with the title role of Israel Zingwill's Merely Mary Ann, which had opened earlier that year in New York, in the Old Madison Square Garden. It was in that role, in London, that she caught the attention of George Bernard Shaw, who wrote the play Major Barbara for her; she never played the title role, as she was committed to a tour of another production at the time.
In 1910, Eleanor Robson married widower banker August Belmont, who was twenty-six years her senior. With her entrance into New York society, opera attendance became obligatory, and the Belmonts were regular patrons of the Metropolitan Opera, where they occupied Box 4. After the outbreak of World War I, Mrs. Belmont devoted her time to raising funds for Belgian Relief and for the Red Cross, making several trans-Atlantic trips as a Red Cross inspector of U.S. Army camps. Her husband was a passionate horseman, with a stud farm in Kentucky and a racing stable on Long Island, where Mrs. Belmont named Man o' War, the most famous race horse of the twentieth century. August Belmont died in 1924.
In 1933, Eleanor Belmont became the first woman to be named to the board of the Metropolitan Opera Association. The next year, largely because of her successful fund-raising efforts, she was named to the board's Executive Committee. In 1935, she proposed to that board the establishment of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, to support the Metropolitan Opera financially and to encourage the appreciation of opera generally in the United States.
In 1952, Mrs. Belmont founded the Metropolitan Opera National Council, whose members were to be available to the opera company's board for advice and consultation and to be another source of financial support for the Met, specifically to fund new productions. In 1954, at Mrs. Belmont's suggestion, the National Council took over what had been the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air, extending the life of this important program that continues to this day to find and nurture young talent. Until her death, on October 24, 1979, at age 100, Eleanor Robson Belmont remained vitally interested in the Met. Her generosity and far-sighted vision live on as a shining example to opera-lovers around the world.
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