The Books: “The Story Of My Life” (Ellen Terry)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir

The Story of My Life, by Ellen Terry

This is one of my favorite books in my entire collection, just in terms of it as an object. Second only to the first-edition Ulysses that my dad recently gave to me. The book I have is a second or third edition according to the copyright page (I can’t quite tell which) – but either way, the book I own actually came out around the time that it was published. Boy, they knew how to make books back then! The pages are thick and shiny, and you can see the indent of the print on the page. There is a frontispiece of Ellen Terry, and a beautiful title page, with ceremonious curly-cue print. It’s a big book, her life was long and full of many events – and scattered throughout are glossy old photographs, etchings, and paintings – of Ellen Terry in all of her great roles. I almost feel strange reading such a book because the book itself is a work of art.

But in terms of the book itself: What a book!!! What a life!!

She writes in simple prosey language, but with an emotionality that shines through. Her character sketches of the people she knew (Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, Shaw, Sarah Bernhardt – the woman knew EVERYONE) are riveting. It’s a book that takes its time, too. She doesn’t hop and skip over events, she delves in … to rehearsal processes, and long conversations she had about art, and acting, and Shakespeare. She is interested, primarily, in the work, and the whole book is a long paean to the life of an artist. Anyone interested in acting should definitely read this book – but anyone interested in the entire history of that era should also check it out. The upheavals in art and criticism in England at that time, the pre-Raphaelites, the decadents, the aesthetes … she was part of that group.

Lewis Carroll (or “Dodson” as she calls him affectionately) adored her and her sisters (not surprisingly) and took this photo of Ellen and her sister Kate.

Ellen Terry was born into a theatrical family. She was third generation “show trash”. Her parents were famous comic actors, and they had eleven children – most of whom went into show business as well. Gordon Craig, famous scenic designer, was Terry’s illegitimate child. She did not believe in “pushing” her children – whatever they wanted they had to fight for on their own … but obviously her successes and example rubbed off, as many of them went into the theatre as well. As a matter of fact, the legacy continues. John Gielgud was Ellen Terry’s great-nephew. Extraordinary. I love Terry’s anecdotes about her children coming to see her perform. Funny stuff:

My little daughter was a severe critic! I think if I had listened to her, I should have left the stage in despair. She saw me act for the first time as Mabel Vane, but no compliments were to be extracted from her.

“You did look long and thin in your gray dress.”

“When you fainted I thought you was going to fall into the orchestra – you was so long.”

Ellen Terry describes her own childhood and there are some really funny moments when my 21st century sensibility is gobsmacked by the childrearing practices of the day. Her parents, naturally, had to work at night at the theatre, so they would lock their children in their hotel room and go off to do the show. Some of the children were infants, others only 5 or 6, and in charge of taking care of the little ones. Nothing bad ever happened. Terry describes kneeling on a window seat, looking out into the night, waiting for her parents to return. She has a vivid memory, as most actors do, and she is able to bring that to life in her writing. It’s truly wonderful stuff.

Terry, naturally, went on to the stage, because there was really nothing else to do in such a family. She made her debut as a young child in 1856, playing with the great Charles Kean in The Winter’s Tale. She traveled with her parents, performing with them at times – but it became clear very early on that light comedy would not be Ellen Terry’s forte. She eventually became known as the premiere actress of Shakespeare in England, and that reputation exists to this day. She performed in stock theatre, regional gigs – she was playing major roles in Shakespeare by the time she was 15. As a young woman, she had huge hits – she played Portia in Merchant of Venice in 1875 and it was such a huge hit that it was what she became known for. She re-created the role of Portia many times in her career. Not only was she a star in the theatre world, but she served as muse for the literary types who hovered around her. London was a much smaller place back then (although I suppose the art world is small wherever you go) – and the circles of art intersected. Writers went to the theatre and came home and wrote sonnets to the performances they had just seen. Oscar Wilde, in 1890, wrote a sonnet after seeing Terry play Portia:

PORTIA
to Ellen Terry
I marvel not Bassanio was so bold
To peril all he had upon the lead,
Or that proud Aragon bent low his head,
Or that Morocco’s fiery heart grew cold:
For in that gorgeous dress of beaten gold
Which is more golden than the golden sun,
No woman Veronese looked upon
Was half so fair as thou whom I behold.
Yet fairer when with wisdom as your shield
The sober-suited lawyer’s gown you donned
And would not let the laws of Venice yield
Antonio’s heart to that accursed Jew-
O Portia! take my heart; it is thy due:
I think I will not quarrel with bond.

He also wrote the following poem to her at the Lyceum Theatre:

As one who poring on a Grecian urn
Scans the fair shapes some Attic hand hath made,
God with slim goddess, goodly man with maid,
And for their beauty’s sake is loath to turn
And face the obvious day, must I not yearn
For many a secret moon of indolent bliss,
When is the midmost shrine of Artemis
I see thee standing, antique-limbed, and stern?

And yet- methinks I’d rather see thee play
That serpent of old Nile, whose witchery
Made Emperors drunken,- come, great Egypt, shake
Our stage with all thy mimic pageants! Nay,
I am growing sick of unreal passions, make
The world thine Actium, me thine Anthony!

I’m reading Richard Ellmann’s majestic biography of Oscar Wilde right now, and he was great friends with the actors of the day – he was trying to become a playwright, first of all, and needed more than anything for one of the star actresses to decide to do his new works (not an easy task) – and he was also always looking for evidence of artifice – not a bad word, in his lexicon – where the surface, the form, completely captured the inner life of beauty. Actors and actresses were perfect examples of this.

Ellen Terry married three times, and her first marriage was to the painter G.F. Watts. This is another example of the circles of art intersecting. Watts had seen all of the Terrys in their various productions – and did many paintings of all of them, the most famous being the ones of Ellen. You’ll recognize them.

That last one depicts her as Ophelia in Hamlet (although she had not yet played that role at the time Watts imagined her into it.)

Her performances drew raves, and she eventually crossed the ocean to tackle the American audience and had great triumphs there as well. In 1878, Terry became part of the great Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre company. She was basically co-producer with him, as well as his leading lady. They were partners for over 20 years, and played every Shakespeare play, multiple times – in London, and also in traveling shows. They were the dynamic duo of the time, an unbeatable team. She made her name (even more so) with some of the roles she performed with Irving. Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (one of the best parts for women in the entire Shakespeare canon) was one of her biggest successes. Here she is as Beatrice:

Henry Irving was her dear partner, and friend – and a great inspiration to her. When he died, she found she could not work for a while, because all joy had gone out of the pursuit with him no longer around. She loved him dearly. Listen to this excerpt from her book about him. It makes me want to cry.

Henry Irving is the monument, the great mark set up to show the genius of will. For years he worked to overcome the dragging leg … he toiled, and he overcame this defect, just as he overcame his difficulty with vowels, and the self-consciousness which in the early stages of his career used to hamper and incommode him.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor’s art infinite. Even up to the last five years of his life, Henry Irving was striving, striving. He never rested on old triumphs, never found a part in which there was no more to do. Once when I was touring with him in America, at the time when he was at the highest point of his fame, I watched him one day in the train – always a delightful occupation, for his face provided many pictures a minute – and being struck by a curious look, half puzzled, half despairing, asked him what he was thinking about.

“I was thinking,” he answered slowly, “how strange it is that I should have made the reputation I have as an actor, with nothing to help me – with no equipment. My legs, my voice, everything has been against me. For an actor who can’t walk, can’t talk, and has no face to speak of, I’ve done pretty well.”

And I, looking at that splendid head, those wonderful hands, the whole strange beauty of him, thought, “Ah, you little know!”

Here she is with Irving:

Her correspondence is rightly famous, and she carried on a lengthy one with George Bernard Shaw. After the partnership with Irving ended, Terry became artistic director of the old Imperial Theatre, and wanted to devote their seasons to the new playwrights, such as Ibsen and Shaw. Controversial stuff. The business was not a success – maybe Terry’s first failure (besides her marriages) – but the resulting correspondence with Shaw is enough to make me look at it as a ringing success. I love one of the things he wrote to her about playing Shakespeare:

Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn’t time for it.

Brilliant. It reminds me of the great anecdote Anthony Hopkins tells about acting in Shakespeare with Laurence Olivier very early on in his career. Hopkins, a melancholic Welshman (is there any other kind) gravitated towards the American style of acting, the “Method” acting of Brando and Clift – and tried to bring all of that to his role in Shakespeare. He was trying to show the subtext, and make it real for himself, etc. etc. not realizing that Shakespeare has already done all of that work and unlike other playwrights – it is all in the language. Olivier coached Hopkins and told him, “The thought is in the line. The only time you pause is at the end of the line where there is punctuation – because that means the thought is over.” Don’t add more thinking to it. Because the thought is in the line. That is one of the greatest challenges for any actor playing Shakespeare and you can see actors (mainly American) mucking that up time and time again. But I love Shaw’s dictum: :”There simply isn’t time for it.”

Here is Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth:

Stunningly beautiful, isn’t it?

Shaw said about Terry: “Every famous man of the 19th century- provided he were a playgoer- has been in love with Ellen Terry.”

She was a great and beloved star. It’s interesting – there was a time when Terry had considered giving up the stage, and I think she did stop working for about 1 or 2 years. Her parents were devastated. Hysterical. Other parents are devastated when their children go INTO show business, hers were devastated when she stopped.

From all I have read about her (and she shows up in any biography of that time – her life intersected with so many others) – she comes across as a lovely warm funny and quite formidable person. She was highly unconventional, modern in her attitudes – and yet also part of this ancient trashy enterprise that was the theatre. She was not a glorified prostitute as many of the leading ladies at that time were, with minimal talent, but great beauty to inspire men to lust and dirty thoughts in the midst of the Victorian properness. Ellen Terry was the real deal – an actress and entrepreneur who also had a canny business sense and, along with Henry Irving, helped bring well-produced and insightful productions all across England, ireland and America. She took risks. She had a low tolerance for being bored. And instead of whining about being bored, she would change her life at the first sign of it. When it was time to move on from something (be it an acting role or a marriage), she moved on. She had a “wild nature” (said one of her friends), and she was able to use that wild-ness beautifully in her 50-plus-year career. She did not self-destruct. She did not descend into infamy as so many other actresses of the day did (because theatre was seen as a barely respectable thing to do … but Terry, being brought up in it, was saved from that attitude. To her, being an actress was the only logical thing she COULD do.)

Her reputation as a great actress remains intact, although no one alive today has seen her perform. She lived long enough to do a couple of silent films, but in general, her retirement was quiet. She lived to the age of 81. She bought a farm in Kent. She loved dogs. She slowly went blind, and eventually succumbed to dementia.

But the love of the populace remained – she was not forgotten. Her fame was still near enough at that point that she was remembered. Her social life was always intense, she was not a recluse or a serious dramatic woman. She was “vivacious” (the word most often used to describe her) and had what can only be described as eternal curiosity about her fellow man and the planet on which she lived. She wasn’t “over” anything. She was not a cynic. She did not succumb to sophistication or bored European jaded-ness. There was always something in her that was like a little child, that little child kneeling on the window seat, looking out into the night, and wondering at the beauty of it all.

She must have been something else onstage. How I would love to have seen her.

The book is so PACKED with great anecdotes that I really struggled with which excerpt to pick. I thought I’d go with one where she talks about Irving playing Hamlet. It really gives a feel for the book.

She, of course, had heard of Henry Irving – and even seen him perform – but Hamlet was by far the most ambitious thing he had attempted. Just listen to how she analyzes it, and how she takes us through how great his Hamlet was, step by step. I especially love her observation about how Irving played Hamlet’s famous speech to the players. Brilliant!!

She’s a wonderful writer.

I had so much fun tracking down all the images for this post.

EXCERPT FROM The Story of My Life, by Ellen Terry

Hamlet was by far the greatest part that he had ever played, or was ever to play. If he had failed – but why pursue it? He could not fail.

Yet the success on the first night at the Lyceum in 1874 was not of that electric, almost hysterical splendor which has greeted the momentous achievements of some actors. The first two acts were received with indifference. The people could not see how packed they were with superb acting – perhaps because the new Hamlet was so simple, so quiet, so free from the exhibition of actors’ artifices which used to bring down the house in “Louis XI” and “Richelieu,” but which were really the easy things in acting, and in “Richelieu” (in my opinion) not especially well done. In “Hamlet” Henry Irving did not go to the audience. He made them come to him. Slowly but surely attention gave place to admiration, admiration to enthusiasm, enthusiasm to triumphant acclaim.

I have seen many Hamlets – Fechter, Charles Kean, Rossi, Frederick Haas, Forbes Robertson, and my own son, Gordon Craig, among them, but they were not in the same hemisphere! I refuse to go and see Hamlets now. I want to keep Henry Irving’s fresh and clear in my memory until I die.

When he engaged me to play Ophelia in 1878 he asked me to go down to Birmingham to see the play, and that night I saw what I shall always consider the perfection of acting. It had been wonderful in 1874. In 1878 it was far more wonderful. It has been said that when he had the “advantage” of my Ophelia, his Hamlet “improved.” I don’t think so. He was always quite independent of the people with whom he acted.

The Birmingham night he knew I was there. He played – I say it without vanity – for me. We players are not above that weakness, if it be a weakness. If ever anything inspires us to do our best it is the present in the audience of some fellow-artist who must in the nature of things know more completely than any one what we intend, what we do, what we feel. The response from such a member of the audience flies across the footlights to us like a flame. I felt it once when I played Olivia before Eleonora Duse. I felt that she felt it once when she played Marguerite Gauthier for me.

When I read “Hamlet” now, everything that Henry did in it seems to me more absolutely right, even than I thought at the time. I would give much to be able to record it all in detail – but it may be my fault – writing is not the medium in which this can be done. Sometimes I can remember every tone of Henry’s voice, every emphasis, every shade of meaning that he saw in the lines and made manifest to the discerning. Yes, I think I could give some pale idea of what his Hamlet was if I read the play.

“Words! words! words!” What is it to say, for instance, that the cardinal qualities of his Prince of Denmark were strength, delicacy, distinction? There was never a touch of commonness. Whatever he did or said, blood and breeding pervaded him.

His “make-up” was very pale, and this made his face beautiful when one was close to him, but at a distance it gave him a haggard look. Some said he looked twice his age.

He kept three things going at the same time – the antic madness, the sanity, the sense of the theatre. The last was to all that he imagined and thought, what charity is said by St. Paul to be to all other virtues.

He was never cross or moody – only melancholy. His melancholy was as simple as it was profound. It was touching, too, rather than defiant. You never thought that he was wantonly sad and enjoying his own misery.

He neglected no coup de theatre to assist him, but who notices the servants when the host is present?

For instance, his first entrance as Hamlet was, what we call in the theatre, very much “worked up”. He was always a tremendous believer in processions, and rightly. It is through such means that Royalty keeps its hold on the feeling of the public, and makes its mark as a Figure and a Symbol. Henry Irving understood this. Therefore, to music so apt that it was not remarkable in itself, but merely a contribution to the general excited anticipation, the Prince of Denmark came on to the stage. I understood later on at the Lyceum what days of patient work had gone to the making of that procession.

At its tail, when the excitement was at fever heat, came the solitary figure of Hamlet, looking extraordinarily tall and thin. The lights were turned down – another stage trick – to help the effect that the figure was spirit rather than man.

He was weary – his cloak trailed on the ground. He did not wear the miniature of his father obtrusively round his neck! His attitude was one which I have seen in a common little illumination to the “Reciter”, compiled by Dr. Pinches (Henry Irving’s old schoolmaster). Yet how right to have taken it, to have been indifferent to its humble origin! Nothing could have been better when translated into life by Irving’s genius.

The hair looked blue-black, like the plumage of a crow, the eyes burning – two fires veiled as yet by melancholy. But the appearance of the man was not single, straight or obvious, as it is when I describe it – any more than his passions throughout the play were. I only remember one moment when his intensity concentrated itself in a straight-forward, unmistakable emotion, without side-current or back-water. It was when he said:

“The play’s the thing
With which to catch the conscience of the King.”

and, as the curtain came down, was seen to be writing madly on his tablets against one of the pillars.

“Oh, God, that I were a writer!” I paraphrase Beatrice with all my heart. Surely a writer could not string words together about Henry Irving’s Hamlet and say nothing, nothing.

“We must start this play a living thing,” he used to say at rehearsals, and he worked until the skin grew tight over his face, until he became livid with fatigue, yet still beautiful, to get the opening lines said with individuality, suggestiveness, speed, and power.

Bernardo: Who’s there?
Francisco: Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.
Bernardo: Long live the King!
Francisco: Bernardo?
Bernardo: He.
Francisco: You come most carefully upon your hour.
Bernardo: ‘Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.
Francisco: For this relief much thanks; ’tis bitter cold …

And all that he tried to make others do with these lines, he himself did with every line of his own part. Every word lived.

Some said: “Oh, Irving only makes Hamlet a love poem!” They said that, I suppose, because in the Nunnery scene with Ophelia he was the lover above the prince and the poet. With what passionate longing his hands hovered over Ophelia at her words:

“Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”

His advice to the players was not advice. He did not speak it as an actor. Nearly all Hamlets in that scene give away the fact that they are actors, and not dilettanti of royal blood. Irving defined the way he would have the players speak as an order, an instruction of the merit of which he was regally sure. There was no patronizing flavor in his acting here, not a touch of “I’ll teach you how to do it.” He was swift – swift and simple – pausing for the right word now and again, as in the phrase “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature.” His slight pause and eloquent gesture was the all-embracing word “Nature” came in answer to his call, were exactly repeated unconsciously years later by the Queen of Roumania (Carmen Sylva). She was telling us the story of a play that she had written. The words rushed out swiftly, but occasionally she would wait for the one that expressed her meaning most comprehensively and exactly, and as she got it, up went her hand in triumph over her head. “Like yours in ‘Hamlet’,” I told Henry at the time.

I knew this Hamlet both ways – as an actress from the stage, and as an actress putting away her profession for the time as one of the audience – and both ways it was superb to me. Tennyson, I know, said it was not a perfect Hamlet. I wonder, then, where he hoped to find perfection!

James Spedding, considered a fine critic in his day, said Irving was “simply hideous … a monster!” Another of these fine critics declared that he never could believe in Irving’s Hamlet after having seen “part (sic) of his performance as a murderer in a commonplace melodrama.” Would one believe that any one could seriously write so stupidly as that about the earnest effort of an earnest actor, if it were not quoted by some of Irving’s biographers?

Some criticism, however severe, however misguided, remains within the bounds of justice, but what is one to think of the QuarterlyReviewer who declared that “the enormous pains taken with the scenery had ensured Mr. Irving’s success”? The scenery was of the simplest – no money was spent on it even when the play was revived at the Lyceum after Colonel Bateman’s death. Henry’s dress probably cost him about £2!

My Ophelia dress was made of material which could not have cost more than 2s. a yard, and not many yards were wanted, as I was at the time thin to vanishing point! I have the dress still, and, looking at it the other day, I wondered what leading lady now would consent to wear it.

At all its best points, Henry’s Hamlet was susceptible of absurd imitation. Think of this well, young actors, who are content to play for safety, to avoid ridicule at all costs, to be “natural” – oh, word most vilely abused! What sort of naturalness is this of Hamlet’s?

“O, villain, villain, smiling damned villain!”

Henry Irving’s imitators could make people burst with laughter when they took off his delivery of that line. And, indeed, the original, too, was almost provocative of laughter – rightly so, for such emotional indignation has its funny as well as its terrible aspect. The mad, and all are mad who have, as Socrates put it, “a divine release from the common ways of men,” may speak ludicrously, even when they speak the truth.

All great acting has a certain strain of extravagance which the imitators catch hold of and give us the eccentric body without the sublime soul.

From the first I saw this extravagance, this bizarrerie in Henry Irving’s acting. I noticed, too, its infinite variety. In “Hamlet”, during the first scene with Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo, he began by being very absent and distant. He exchanged greetings sweetly and gently, but he was the visionary. His feet might be on the ground, but his head was towards the stars “where the eternal are.” Years later he said to me of another actor in “Hamlet”: “He would never have seen the ghost.” Well, there was never any doubt that Henry Irving saw it, and it was through his acting in the Horatio scene that he made us sure.

As a bad actor befogs Shakespeare’s meaning, so a good actor illuminates it. Bit by bit as Horatio talks, Hamlet comes back into the world. He is still out of it when he says:

“My father! Methinks I see my father.”

But the dreamer becomes attentive, sharp as a needle, with the words:

“For God’s love, let me hear.”

Irving’s face, as he listened to Horatio’s tale, blazed with intelligence. He cross-examined the men with keenness and authority. His mental deductions as they answered were clearly shown. With “I would I had been there” the cloud of unseen witnesses with whom he had before been communing again descended. For a second or two Horatio and the rest of the world did not exist for him … So onward to the crowning couplet:

” … foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o’erwhelm them to men’s eyes.”

After having been very quiet and rapid, very discreet, he pronounced these lines in a loud, clear voice, dragged out every syllable as if there never could be an end to his horror and his rage.

I had been familiar with the scene from my childhood – I had studied it; I had heard from my father how Macready acted in it, and now I found that I had a fool of an idea of it! That’s the advantage of study, good people, who go to see Shakespeare acted. It makes you know sometimes what is being done, and what you never dreamed would be done when you read the scene at home.

At one of the audiences I was much struck by Irving’s treatment of interjections and exclamations in “Hamlet”. He breathed the line: “O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,” as one long yearning, and “O horrible, O horrible! most horrible!” as a groan. When we first went to America his address at Harvard touched on this very subject, and it may be interesting to know that what he preached in 1885 he had practiced as far back as 1874.

“On the question of pronunciation, there is something to be said which I think in ordinary teaching is not sufficiently considered. Pronunciation should be simple and unaffected, but not always fashioned rigidly according to a dictionary standard. No less an authority than Cicero points out that pronunciation must vary widely according to the emotions to be expressed; that it may be broken or cut with a varying or direct sound, and that it serves for the actor the purpose of color to the painter, from which to draw variations. Take the simplest illustration. The formal pronunciation of A-h is ‘Ah’, of O-h, ‘Oh’, but you cannot stereotype the expression of emotion like this. These exclamations are words of one syllable, but the speaker who is sounding the gamut of human feeling will not be restricted in his pronunciation by dictionary rule. It is said of Edmund Kean that he never spoke such ejaculations, but always sighed or groaned them. Fancy an actor saying:

‘My Desdemona! Oh! oh! oh!’

“Words are intended to express feelings and ideas, not to bind them in rigid fetters; the accents of pleasure are different from the accents of pain, and if a feeling is more accurately expressed as in nature by a variation of sound not provided by the laws of pronunciation, then such imperfect laws must be disregarded and nature vindicated!”

It was of the address in which these words occur that a Boston hearer said that it was felt by every one present that “the truth had been spoken by a man who had learned it through living and not through theory.”

I leave his Hamlet for the present with one further reflection. It was in courtesy and humor that it differed most widely from other Hamlets that I have seen and heard of. This Hamlet was never rude to Polonius. His attitude towards the old Bromide (I thank you, Mr. Gelett Burgess, for teaching me that word which so lightly and charmingly describes the child of darkness and of platitude) was that of one who should say: “You dear, funny old simpleton, whom I have had to bear with all my life – how terribly in the way you seem now.” With what slightly amused and cynical playfulness this Hamlet said; “I had thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well; they imitated humanity so abominably.

Hamlet was by far his greatest triumph, although he would not admit it himself – preferring in some moods to declare that his finest work was done in Macbeth, which was almost universally disliked.