Ellen Terry

English actor

• Born: February 27, 1847
• Birthplace: Coventry, Warwickshire, England
• Died: July 21, 1928
• Place of death: Smallhythe, Kent, England

As the leading female Shakespearean actor and one of the most liberated women of her time, Terry left an indelible impression on the artistic and social worlds of Victorian England.

Early Life

Alice Ellen Terry was, as the theatrical cliché has it, very nearly “born in a costume trunk.” One of eleven children of the roving players Ben and Sarah Terry, she was delivered in a theatrical rooming house in Warwickshire, England, while her parents were on tour. Her early years were spent in the then marginally respectable world of the theater. She literally grew up backstage, and, because she never received any serious formal education, the theater served as her schoolroom. From the beginning, young Ellen was overshadowed by her older sister Kate, whose promise as an actor won for her a contract with the legendary actor-manager Edmund Kean in 1852. It was at Kean’s Princess’s Theatre in London that the nine-year-old Ellen made her theatrical debut in the role of Prince Mamillius in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (pr. c. 1610-1611). The Keans, especially the disciplinarian Mrs. Kean, were an important influence on Ellen, teaching her lessons about acting and about theatrical protocol that would serve her well in later years.

Though Kate was clearly the burgeoning star of the family, Ellen had gained considerable exposure during her family’s years with the prestigious Kean troupe, and in 1861 she joined the London-based troupe of Albina de Rhona, under whose auspices she appeared in some ten plays, most of them forgotten melodramas. In 1862, Ellen joined the Bristol stock company that employed Kate, and the Terry sisters quickly became local celebrities, attracting the attention of fans and critics alike. Among the latter was Edward William Godwin, an aspiring architect and theatrical designer. Ellen was strongly attracted to the married, twenty-eight-year-old Godwin, and to what he represented: culture, sophistication, and bohemianism.

Terry was a busy actor who, still in her teens, was methodically learning her trade and attracting favorable attention. In the space of a year she appeared in Shakespeare’s Othello (pr. 1604) and Much Ado About Nothing (pr. c. 1598-1599), in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (pr., pb. 1775), and in Tom Taylor’s 1858 play Our American Cousin (which was to achieve notoriety as the playAbraham Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated in 1865). It was playwright Taylor who introduced Ellen to the painter George Frederick Watts, a temperamental and talented portraitist and a member of the increasingly important Pre-Raphaelite school of poets and painters. Struck by the picturesqueness of the Terry sisters, Watts used them as models for his beautiful The Sisters. He was the first painter to immortalize Ellen Terry, and she later served as a model for some of his best paintings, including Choosing, Ellen Terry, and Ophelia, Ellen posing as Shakespeare’s doomed heroine in the latter.

On February 20, 1864, the sixteen-year-old Terry married the forty-six-year-old Watts, and the marriage seems to have been disastrous from the first. Terry’s desire for stability and respectability in what had been a peripatetic and uncertain life is somewhat understandable; less understandable is Watts’s motivation for marrying a girl thirty years his junior. An inept lover and a hopeless neurotic, Watts immediately tried to educate Terry in the ways of polite society, and the formerly carefree, high-spirited girl was miserable. The constant stream of celebrities through the Watts home—including the poets Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and the politicians Benjamin Disraeli and William Ewart Gladstone—only slightly alleviated Terry’s boredom and frustration at being seen and not heard.

After ten months, Terry left Watts and returned to her parents, a social outcast. Reluctantly, she began to act again, though for two years she was still overshadowed by her sister’s now undisputed stardom. In 1867, Terry joined the acting company at the New Queen’s Theatre, where she met a young actor named Henry Irving and played opposite him in a bastardization of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (pr. c. 1593-1594). Somewhere along the line, however, Edward Godwin reentered her life, and in October, 1868, Terry ran off with him, leaving no word of her whereabouts with her family and leading them to believe that she had met with foul play. The mystery was soon solved, and it was discovered that she and Godwin had taken up residence together in the village of Wheathampstead, thirty-five miles from London. She stayed with Godwin for some seven years and bore him two children: Edith in December, 1869, and Edward in January, 1872. The world would later know the boy as Gordon Craig.

Life’s Work

Little is known of Terry’s years with Godwin, though for a time, at least, they seem to have been happy. This was the most settled and domestic period that Terry would ever know, and she took great pleasure in keeping the house, tending the children, and welcoming her lover home after his daily commute from London. Terry and Godwin shared many interests, the most important of which was the theater. Terry learned to aid Godwin in his stage designs, and together they read the works of Shakespeare. In time, Godwin designed and built a house for his family, and together he and Terry planted and tended a garden. Their rural idyll came to an end, however, when finances forced Terry to return to the stage. Though undeniably a major architectural and artistic talent, Godwin had no head for business, and by the winter of 1873-1874 the bill collectors were pounding at the door. The playwright Charles Reade, an old family friend, offered Terry a part in his current play, The Wandering Heir (1872), and in February, 1874, Terry returned to the stage after an absence of some five years.

Bolstered both by favorable reviews and by the need for money, Terry performed in several more plays with Reade before accepting an offer from a Mrs. Bancroft, the actor-manager of the Prince of Wales Theatre, to play Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597). Though her career was straining her relationship with Godwin, he was enlisted to supervise the scenery and costumes for the production, and the results were magnificent. Godwin’s design work, however, was dominated by Terry’s performance: When the play opened in April, 1875, Terry became an overnight sensation. Her first major Shakespearean role had made her a major star, and she had acquired a legion of fans who came to see her perform even in the less distinguished plays that followed the closing of The Merchant of Venice.

Terry’s relationship with Godwin, however, could not bear the strain. In March, 1876, he was married to one of his students. Terry, in turn, was married to the actor Charles Wardell in November, 1877, soon after her divorce from Watts became final.

During that same year, Terry moved to the Royal Court Theatre, where she scored a huge success in Olivia, an adaptation of Oliver Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1764) written especially for her by W. G. Wills. In 1878, theatrical history was made when the same Henry Irving with whom Terry had acted eleven years before invited her to play opposite him in a new production of Hamlet (pr. c. 1600-1601) at the Lyceum Theatre. This was the great age of the theatrical actor-manager who not only acted in plays but also oversaw nearly every facet of their production, from costume design to music to provincial tours. With his closest rival, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Irving reigned over this era, combining artistic sensibility with an unparalleled flair for public relations. He and Terry were to remain together for some twenty years, during which they undertook nearly every major Shakespearean play and transformed the Lyceum into a theatrical legend.

During those years, Terry maintained a schedule that would fell most modern performers. Besides performing at the Lyceum in London, she and Irving regularly toured the British provinces and together made seven grueling but profitable tours of the United States. In addition, she still had family responsibilities. By 1881, she and Charles Wardell had legally separated, and Terry acted as both mother and father to her children. Her correspondence shows that she was a caring parent to both “Edy” and “Teddy,” but it is clear that her son was the love of her life.

From early childhood, he displayed the talent and temperament of the born artist, often appearing in plays with his mother but possessing in greater measure his father’s talent for the graphic arts. As Gordon Craig, he would change the history of theatrical design, but his personal life was always a shambles. Financially and personally irresponsible, he was forever relying on his mother’s name and on her money to establish him in one business venture after another, and to extricate him from a lifetime of trouble. Though he often neglected her, Terry adored him to the end of her life, acting as a doting grandmother to his many illegitimate children, including one by the dancer Isadora Duncan.

In spite of a short-lived third marriage late in her life, Terry’s only other enduring professional and personal commitment was to Irving, though whether the two were ever really romantically involved is unknown. Certainly she spent more time with him than with anyone else, both on stage and off stage. Besides the plays of Shakespeare, the two scored major triumphs in Wills’s adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, in Tennyson’s The Cup, and in revivals of Olivia.

As famous in the United States as in their native England, the pair became the stuff of myth, anticipating such great twentieth century acting duos as Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. Unlike modern performers, however, who characteristically star in a play for a Broadway season and then, perhaps, tour with it for a year, Terry and Irving never abandoned their great roles. Less haughty than modern theater, the theater of the Victorian era demanded that actors maintain a repertoire of tried-and-true hits that, in the event of another play’s failure, could be revived at short notice and with a minimum of rehearsal. Such performers as Terry, Irving, and their great contemporaries Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse, Edwin Booth, and Joseph Jefferson carried around in their heads dozens of parts, ranging from the English and Continental classics to long-forgotten popular melodramas. Irving had just finished an engagement with one of these latter, The Bells (1871), when he died on October 13, 1905.

The reverence and dignity accorded Irving at the time of his death bespoke the respectability that he had brought to the profession of acting, a lower-class business when he and Terry had first begun. Terry, too, garnered honors late in her career. In 1906, her friends and admirers staged a benefit to celebrate her fiftieth anniversary on the stage, and among the participants were actors Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Lillie Langtry, opera star Enrico Caruso, composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, mystery writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling. From 1910 to 1921, she undertook a series of lecture tours and was everywhere received as a royal personage. In 1925, she was accorded the honor that had long eluded her: She was created Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by King George V and Queen Mary. Ever open to new experiences, the elderly Terry appeared in several silent films, though the cinema was clearly not her medium. She died of a stroke on July 21, 1928, in her beloved cottage at Smallhythe.

Significance

During her long life, Ellen Terry attracted the attention of many celebrities. Although yet an obscure young bride, she befriended Great Britain’s poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and was photographed by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), who adored her. She was painted not only by her husband, G. F. Watts, but also by John Singer Sargent, the most acclaimed portraitist of his age. The painter William Holman Hunt designed her first bridal gown. She counted among her fans painter James McNeill Whistler and poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. Poet, playwright, and novelist Oscar Wilde wrote sonnets for her, and J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan (pr. 1904, pb. 1928), wrote a play for her. For many years she carried on an intimate correspondence with George Bernard Shaw, who also wrote a play for her. Isadora Duncan confided in her as she would have in a mother, and her women friends included the legendary actors Lillie Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt, and Eleanora Duse.

Little wonder, then, that Ellen Terry is credited with helping to create the modern star system, in which performers are lauded not only for their performances but also for their personalities. She was one of the first female actors to endorse a commercial product, and one of the first to start a fashion trend when she appeared in Olivia for the first time during the 1870’s. In her unaffected and “natural” style of acting and in her unconventional personal life, Terry was in every way an original, representing as she did a sharp departure from the histrionics of the early nineteenth century stage and from the restrictive morals of Victorian England.

Bibliography

Craig, Edward Gordon. Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self. London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1931. Terry’s son’s reminiscences of his mother tell as much about him as they do about her, but they are continually interesting, providing anecdotes and impressions that one can find nowhere else. A colorful memoir by a spoiled child who became an important personage in his own right.

Irving, Laurence. Henry Irving: The Actor and His World. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. Any study of Terry must include a biography of Irving, and this one, though written by the great actor-manager’s grandson, is surprisingly thorough and well documented. A definitive biography.

McDonald, Russ. Look to the Lady: Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, and Judi Dench on the Shakespearean Stage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Examines the lives, careers, and acting techniques of Terry and two other actors who were renowned for their interpretations of Shakespeare’s heroines.

Manvell, Roger. Ellen Terry. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968. The closest thing to a definitive biography, this study is exhaustive and carefully researched.

Prideaux, Tom. Love or Nothing: The Life and Times of Ellen Terry. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975. Written by a distinguished popular journalist, this book is chatty, personal, and interpretive. Recommended for the general reader.

St. John, Christopher, ed. Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932. A fascinating record of the relationship between two luminaries. These letters show Terry’s private side to have been as compelling and charismatic as her stage performances.

Saintsbury, H. A., and Cecil Palmer, eds. We Saw Him Act: A Symposium on the Art of Sir Henry Irving. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1939. Reprint. 1969. This eccentric and lively collection of essays on Irving’s stage career contains innumerable references to Terry. Essential to understanding the chemistry between Terry and Irving.

Shearer, Moira. Ellen Terry. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 1998. A brief overview of Terry’s life and career, describing how she earned her reputation as the greatest female actor in Victorian Britain.

Terry, Ellen. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932. First published as The Story of My Life in 1908. Like any autobiography, this book is not to be trusted as fact, but it provides otherwise unattainable insights into Terry’s dedication, humor, and humanity.