“It is only in comedy that people seem to know what I am driving at!”
— Ellen Terry
It’s her birthday.
In 1907, great English actress Ellen Terry (approaching her 50th year onstage) appeared in George Bernard Shaw’s satirical Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. Shaw wrote the part of Lady Cicely Waynflete for her, and he styled the male character, Captain Brassbound, for beloved English actor Henry Irving, who had just died the previous year (and worked with Ellen for decades). At this point, Terry was struggling with her eyesight, and there were no parts written for women of her age in the theatre. The more things change the more they stay the well you know the rest.
More, much more, about one of the biggest stars of the Victorian age, and a real inspiration to me after the jump:
For decades, she worked in Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre, which gave her steady work and (for the most part) good roles. With Irving’s death, she felt adrift. Shaw thought she was the best thing since sliced bread – and had been insinuating to her through their copious correspondence (collected in one volume, a must-read: I wrote about it here) that limiting herself just to Lyceum productions was not good for her. Irving resisted modern drama. He stayed away from Wilde, Ibsen, Shaw – and there were parts in all of the plays written by these men that Ellen could have soared in. With Irving gone, Shaw saw his chance.
The play ran for 12 weeks in 1906. Ellen knew she was too old for the part. She knew something was “off”. She had a hard time remembering her lines, and would sometimes go blank. Regardless, the show went on. She was still a star, a celebrated actress.
Now this is interesting: Terry stumbled badly in the beginning of the run. Virginia Woolf saw the show one of those early nights. She was a giant fan of Terry. Woolf recorded her observations:
[When Ellen Terry spoke] it was as if someone drew a bow over a ripe, richly seasoned ‘cello; it grated, it glowed, it grumbled. Then she stoped speaking. She put on her glasses. She gazed intently at the back of the settee. She had forgotten her part. But did it matter?
Terry in “Captain Brassbound’s Conversion”
To a fan like Woolf, it might not have mattered, but Terry was crushed. Had she lost it? Was her talent gone? It was an odd sensation for her, to not know how to BE onstage anymore. She dashed off apologetic letters to Shaw about it, frantic she had ruined his play. Shaw wrote her back and says something rather extraordinary (and rare) for a playwright:
Behave as if you were more precious than many plays, which is the truth.
He’s telling her the play is NOT the thing – it is what YOU bring to it that is special. Shaw could be extremely annoying and patronizing but he had a way of relaxing her and simultaneously stimulating her – this was unique in her long career. Apparently, after his words, she stopped worrying about the lines so much, and didn’t “blank” out if she forgot them. She just improvised as the character, because she knew the character – she knew how to keep the play alive, with the lines or no. Bernard Shaw approved and wrote in a letter to a friend:
[She is] magnificent … She simply lives through Lady Cicely’s adventures and says whatever comes into her head, which by the way is now much better than what I wrote.
I love this anecdote because it shows Ellen Terry had a process that, like every process, needed to grow and change as she grew and changed. One size does not fit all. She had played all of the celebrated parts in celebrated productions. Her Beatrice was legendary. So was her Lady Macbeth.
She came to the stage and there was thunderous applause at her first appearance. Her fame cannot be overstated. She worked hard and knew HOW to work. She was SMART. But she had to change in order to stay alive. “Why did this work for me without me even thinking about it when I was 22??” Well, because you are 52 now. Terry kept at it. In front of an audience. She figured out her way during the run of the play.
I will let Virginia Woolf have the final word (all of these excerpts come from Michael Holroy’d’s book on Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families). Woolf captures what it means by star quality, not an easy thing to describe or pin down. But she nails it.
Shakespeare could not fit her, not Ibsen; nor Shaw. But there is, after all, a greater dramatist than Shakespeare, Ibsen, or Shaw. There is Nature … now and again Nature creates a new part, an original part. The actors who act that part always defy our attempts to name them … And thus while other actors are remembered because they were Hamlet, Phedre, or Cleopatra, Ellen Terry is remembered because she was Ellen Terry.
Goosebumps.
Terry as Imogen in Cymbeline
John Singer Sargent painted her as Lady Macbeth in her famous costume:
From Terry’s wonderful memoir The Story of my Life, giving a fascinating glimpse of Tennyson, the private man, and his kindness to her, a young woman suddenly in his orbit:
Little Holland House, where Mr. Watts lived, seemed to me a paradise, where only beautiful things were allowed to come. All the women were graceful, and all the men were gifted. The trio of sisters – Mrs. Prinsep (mother of the painter), Lady Somers, and Mrs. Cameron, who was the pioneer in artistic photography as we know it today – were known as Beauty, Dash, and Talent. There were two more beautiful sisters, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Dalrymple. Gladstone, Disraeli and Browning were among Mr. Watts’ visitors. At Freshwater, where I went soon after my marriage, I first saw Tennyson.
As I write down these great names I feel almost guilty of an imposture! Such names are bound to raise high anticipation, and my recollections of the men to whom some of the names belong are so very humble.
I sat, shrinking and timid, in a corner – the girl-wife of a famous painter. I was, if I was anything at all, more of a curiosity, of a side-show, than hostess to these distinguished visitors…
Tennyson was more to me than a magic-lantern shape, flitting across the blank of my young experience, never to return. The first time I saw him he was sitting at the table in his library, and Mrs. Tennyson, her very slender hands hidden by thick gloves, was standing on a step-ladder handing him down some heavy books. She was very frail, and looked like a faint tea-rose. After that one time I only remember her lying on a sofa.
In the evenings I went walking with Tennyson over the fields, and he would point out to me the differences in the flights of different birds, and tell me to watch their solid phalanxes turning against the sunset, the compact wedge suddenly narrowing sharply into a thin line. He taught me to recognize the barks of trees and to call wild flowers by their names. He picked me the first bit of pimpernel I ever noticed. Always I was quite at ease with him. He was so wonderfully simple…
It was easy enough to me to believe that Tennyson was a poet. He showed it in everything, although he was entirely free from any assumption of the poetical role…
At Freshwater I was still so young that I preferred playing Indians and Knights of the Round Table with Tennyson’s sons, Hallam and Lionel, and the young Camerons, to sitting indoors noticing what the poet did and said. I was mighty proud when I learned how to prepare his daily pipe for him. It was a long churchwarden, and he liked the stem to be steeped in a solution of sal volatile, or something of that kind, so that it did not stick to his lips. But he and all the others seemed to me very old. There were my young knights waiting for me; and jumping gates, climbing trees, and running paper-chases are pleasant when one is young.
It was not to inattentive ears that Tennyson read his poems. His reading was most impressive, but I think he read Browning’s “Ride from Ghent to Aix” better than anything of his own, except, perhaps, “The Northern Farmer”. He used to preserve the monotonous rhythm of the galloping horses in Browning’s poem, and made the words come out sharply like hoofs upon a road. It was a little comic until one got used to it, but that fault lay in the ear of the hearer. It was the right way and the fine way to read this particular poem, and I have never forgotten it.
In after years I met Tennyson again, when with Henry Irving I acted in two of his plays at the Lyceum…To him and to the others my early romance was always the most interesting thing about me. When I saw them in later times, it seemed as if months, not years, had passed since I was Nelly Watts.
I’ve always been a little bit obsessed with Ellen Terry, ever since I came across an edition of her memoir in a second-hand bookstore. Her memoir is transporting. I wrote about it here (years ago). I so wished for a time machine so I could go back in time and see her in action in one of the productions at the Lyceum. Her Much Ado. Her Macbeth.
About her Lady Macbeth: Ellen Terry was known as a “light” actress. She made her mark in comedies. And then came Lady Macbeth. She knew her regular approach wouldn’t fit. She needed to go deeper, to figure out her own “way in”. Playing Lady M was a huge risk for her. Audiences might reject her. She trembled at the thought. She was intimidated. So she got to work researching and writing out her thoughts on the character. I wrote a huge piece about Terry’s approach to playing Lady M.
Ellen Terry lived a wild life, when you consider the Victorian backdrop. She was ensconced in a world of older men from a very young age. They all found her to be fascinating, she was a muse to many of them. She was painted, celebrated. This was all before she became famous. She was a teenager. She had two children “out of wedlock”, as they say. It’s always been very cool to me that Terry’s children both grew up to be famous as well, and one of them was an influential (and impractical) visionary of theatrical design. Her daughter Edith Craig grew up to be an actress, a producer, director, costume designer, stage manager, as well as an activist for women’s rights and suffrage. She appeared onstage with her mother.
Edith was an open lesbian, and lived with two women for forty years in a thruple. She was a pioneer in so many ways. In her world – the theatre – being gay wasn’t a big deal, even back then. But to the larger world it was a very big deal, and everyone had the appalling example of what happened to Oscar Wilde front and center. (The world has reserved most of its homophobia for gay men. When you hear bigots ranting about how “unnatural” gay sex is, it’s anal sex they’re talking about. Girl-on-girl action is considered hot. So lesbians were able to function and circulate, and maybe they got family pressure and your garden variety social pressure … but the rage was reserved for men, basically because men, unfortunately, rule the world, and the very thought of gay male sex sent shivers of revulsion – and desire probably – down their spines. Then they dress that up in “Christian” moralizing. It’s so transparent.) Anyway, Edith Craig lived a long life, and was incredibly active, forming theatre companies, raising money, directing, producing, she was a powerhouse.
Ellen Terry’s son, Gordon Craig, was a production designer, whose otherworldly massive sets were not practical, and not meant to be practical. They were theories, ideas, of the theatre and its purpose.
These designs – and his writing – inspired a generation. Orson Welles’ designs for his 1937 production of Julius Caesar – all those platforms and black curtains – was inspired by Craig’s work. Craig moved theatrical design out of the practical and literal and into the fantastical. We studied Gordon Craig in college. He wrote a lot, his theories on theatre, his ideas for design. Gordon Craig was very very modern. He was one of Isadora Duncan’s lovers. The man got around.
Both Edith and Gordon lived to a very old age. I mentioned above Michael Holroyd’s book, which is about the families of Ellen Terry and her producing partner Henry Irving: their parents, them, their children, all of whom became influential people in their own right. It’s a book so made for me I couldn’t even believe it existed!
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