Mary McCormic

Who was Mary McCormic?

Mary McCormic was an American operatic soprano and a professor of opera at the University of North Texas College of Music.

For more than a decade, McCormic was among the most famous sopranos in the world. She was most known for her leading roles with the Paris National Opera, the Opéra-Comique, the Monte Carlo Opera, and the Chicago Civic Opera. She spent much of 1937 touring with the Kryl Symphony Orchestra.

McCormic was born in Belleville, Arkansas. A onetime obscure Arkansas housewife, McCormic rose to stardom and enjoyed a colorful personal life — four marriages and four divorces, almost a fifth, a high-dollar lawsuit defense for assaulting an unauthorized female biographer, boom and bust personal wealth, witty humor, and brush with royalty. McCormic captured world intrigue with the panache of the operas she starred in, all with the backdrop of being born at the end of the Gilded Age, growing up as a teenager during World War I, flourishing as an opera superstar through the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, the Jazz Age, the Great Crash, and failing in her last two high profile marriages in the throes of the Great Depression. She died, in her eighties, in Amarillo, Texas.