Sarah Siddons

English actor

• Born: July 5, 1755
• Birthplace: Brecon, Brecknockshire, Wales
• Died: June 8, 1831
• Place of death: London, England

Siddons has been acknowledged as England’s first great tragic actor. Through her intelligence, talent, and decorum, she became the embodiment of the tragic muse and elevated the work of actor to a position of respectability.

Early Life

Sarah Siddons (SIHD-ehnz), born Sarah Kemble, was the eldest of the twelve children of Roger Kemble, an itinerant actor-manager, and Sarah Ward. Kemble ran the traveling Kemble theater company. Presumably on stage at an early age, Sarah’s first recorded appearance—which came at age twelve—was as Princess Elizabeth in a production of Charles I (1767).

In the Kemble theater company, where Sarah performed her first role, was William Siddons, eleven years older, good-looking and gentlemanly, though not particularly talented as an actor. A relationship developed between William and Sarah, but her parents frowned upon William as a suitor, favoring instead a country squire for their daughter. Sarah was thus sent to the house of the Greatheeds of Warwick, where for the next several years, as a companion to the family, she often read for the elder Greatheed, indulged her passion for John Milton, and learned the graces of eighteenth century life.

Nevertheless, the romance between Sarah and William continued, and her parents finally acquiesced. In October, 1773, Sarah and William were married. The following year they left the Kemble troupe and moved to the theater in Cheltenham, where, in November, at the age of nineteen, Sarah gave birth to a son, Henry.

A company of London aristocrats was much impressed with the young actor playing Belvidera in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved (1774) and recommended her to David Garrick, the manager of London’s Drury Lane Theatre. Garrick hired her for the spring, 1776, season. Although thrilled to be working with Garrick, Sarah was not successful. Recovering from the birth of a second child, meeting with hostility from other leading actresses, and cast in inappropriate roles, she spent a miserable six months at Drury Lane. Engaged for the summer in Birmingham but expecting to return to Drury Lane in the fall, the Siddonses were abruptly informed that their services would not be needed. The blow was devastating; Sarah had two infants to support, and an ineffectual husband. She would never forget the degradation she suffered at Garrick’s hands or her subsequent loss of confidence.

Life’s Work

Acting at Bath and Bristol for the following six years, Sarah Siddons honed her skills and developed supporters, so that when Garrick recalled her to Drury Lane in 1782, her debut in Thomas Southerne’s Isabella: Or, The Fatal Marriage was a huge success. Her status was assured, as she had earlier received acclaim as Euphrasia in Arthur Murphy’s The Grecian Daughter (1777), the title role of Alicia in Nicolas Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1774) and as Belvidera—favorite roles throughout her career. Between 1778 and 1781, she added William Shakespeare’s Isabella in Measure for Measure (1604) and Constance in King John (c. 1596-1597), as well as Mrs. Beverley in Edward Moore’s The Gamester (1753).

The great twenty-five-year period of the Kemble family partnership at Drury Lane and later at Covent Garden began with the succession of Siddons’s brother, John Philip Kemble, to the management of Drury Lane in 1788. With Siddons and other siblings, the theater achieved a status rarely seen. Siddons was the principal attraction, evoking fainting spells from the women and tears from the men of the audience. Siddons excelled in the role of the suffering woman oppressed by a domineering father or husband and abandoned to poverty or death. On stage she projected majesty, strength, and the passion of the wronged woman, with her expressive eyes and tall and stately figure. In her private life, however, she appeared timid, dependent, and submissive to William, who managed her money, contracts, and engagements, and who evidently resented her exalted position as the years progressed. No doubt the conflict between her professional and domestic lives exacted a toll with which she had to struggle, but the theater was her life and her livelihood.

Siddons’s most celebrated role was that of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. Her extensive notes about the character offer an almost modern psychological analysis. Siddons sees Lady Macbeth in the early scenes as charming, seductive, and ambitious, but after the murder of Duncan, she begins to experience remorse. She represses these feelings to support Macbeth, whom she loves and wants to protect, but she is gradually overwhelmed by guilt within. For the final performance of her career on June 29, 1812, Siddons chose to play Lady Macbeth, with her brother John in the title role. The applause at the end of the sleepwalking scene was unstoppable. The curtain was dropped, but the applause continued. Finally, Siddons returned, and, after a brief farewell speech, the play was forced to end.

A legend in her own time, Siddons was also aware of her public image. She confessed that she actively sought fame. Portraitists sought her as well, because paintings of the famous were real commodities that could engender publicity for both the artist and the actor. In 1783, Sir Joshua Reynolds began his masterpiece, Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784), with Siddons as Melpomene. Her celebrity brought eminent friends, among them Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole, Hester Lynch Piozzi (also known as Mrs. Thrale), and Sir Walter Scott. She was invited frequently to Windsor Castle and Buckingham House (now Buckingham Palace) to read for King George III and Queen Charlotte.

Celebrity had its disadvantages, too. While it assured full houses at Drury Lane and lucrative engagements in Scotland and Ireland during the summers, it also brought requests for benefit performances (unpaid), social engagements (which she usually declined), and pleas for handouts from friends and relatives (which she tried to fulfill).

Although her career was brilliant, her personal life was not without pain. She experienced two miscarriages and the deaths of, first, a six-year-old child and then her two young daughters, Sarah and Maria. Her marriage deteriorated after twenty years, and she suffered frequent periods of ill health, likely brought on by overwork and the stress of supporting her large family. Age was not kind either. She retired in 1812 but returned to the stage several times for special occasions. She lived for nearly twenty years more, seeming rather restless and yearning to recover the strength of her younger years and the excitement of performance. At her death in 1831, five thousand people followed her funeral procession.

Significance

Sarah Siddons’s celebrity has yet to dim; she is still considered the greatest tragic actress that England has ever produced. To her contemporaries her private life was blameless and her artistry unequaled. Many of the roles she played served as models for moral instruction. Into the twenty-first century, she serves as the model of a woman of genius, who, although operating within a patriarchal society, forged an identity that transcended class, gender, and the centuries. The Sarah Siddons Society, founded in Chicago in 1952, awards a yearly statuette in her name to honor great actresses.

Bibliography

Boaden, James. Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons: Interspersed with Anecdotes of Authors and Actors. London: Gibbings, 1893. A rambling, sometimes humorous work written by Siddons’s first major biographer, with an informative account of eighteenth century theatrical life.

Booth, Michael R., John Stokes, and Susan Bassnett. Three Tragic Actresses: Siddons, Rachel, Ristori. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. The Siddons segment of this three-part, illustrated work presents a new historicist approach with quotations from primary sources. The author locates Siddons within political, social, and cultural contexts.

Donkin, Ellen. “Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger: Feminist Historiography for Eighteenth Century Theater.” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. A feminist perspective on Siddons’s strong response to the personal attacks of hostile audiences.

Kelly, Linda. The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and the London Stage. New York: Random House, 1980. A well-written dovetailing of the careers of the two famous siblings. Illustrated.

McPherson, Heather. “Picturing Tragedy: ’Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse’ Revisited.” Eighteenth Century Studies 33, no. 3 (2000): 401-430. Considers the relationship between portraiture and the stage as represented by Sir Joshua Reynolds’s painting of Siddons as the tragic muse. Illustrated with eight portraits of Siddons by different artists.

Manvell, Roger. Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971. An excellent account containing earlier biographers’ material of Siddons’s professional and personal lives. Illustrations, useful appendices, bibliography, and index.

Siddons, Sarah Kemble. Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, 1773-1785. Edited by William Van Lennep. Cambridge, England: Widener Library, 1942. A very brief (33-page) account in Siddons’s own words that begins with her marriage to William Siddons and ends with the Drury Lane season of 1784-1785.