“Enter a chorus of lepers.”

A biography that I am drooling to read (eventually, when I get back up on the reading horse for real): Michael Holroyd’s A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families, a dual biography of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. I’m so excited!

While the review in the WP is a bit annoying (Oh, so short chapters = good book? Hm.) – it also captures the reviewer’s excitement about the entire book (“the most completely delicious, the most civilized and the most wickedly entertaining work of nonfiction anyone could ask for”), and I find it infectious. I also enjoy the bit about the chorus of lepers.

I can’t wait to read it.

I know a bit about Henry Irving and Ellen Terry – they come up all the time in any theatrical-history reading you’re going to do, but I have also read The Story of My Life – Recollections and Reflections. I wrote a giant post about Ellen Terry – you might find it interesting. She appears to have been one of those women – powerful, yet somehow light-hearted still, fun – that captures the imagination of men everywhere. People were obsessed with her. Oscar Wilde of course (you can read some of the lyrics he wrote in homage to her in that Ellen Terry post) – and the painter Watts (who immortalized her time and time again – he also married her) – George Bernard Shaw – royalty – the list goes on and on. But she, although wonderful at her job, a chameleon really, was not an imperious kind of person. She must have been something else on stage, boy, but in person, it sounds like she was fun, vivacious, and emotionally available. Not a drip.

Henry Irving is an interesting case as well. I have heard the stories about him from his contemporaries, who left records of his meticulous process and hard work – but I am excited to learn a little bit more about this giant of the stage, whose name is nearly totally forgotten today.

Here is one of my favorite anecdotes about Henry Irving, which brings tears to my eyes, no matter how many times I read it.

Ellen Terry writes:

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!”

Glorious. Can’t wait to read Holroyd’s book. What a find!

Henry Irving (if you go read the excerpt I posted from Terry’s book, you can really see how in-depth she goes about his brilliance as an actor, his process)

Painting of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving in Abelard and Heloise – by Henrietta Rae

The great Ellen Terry

I ask again. Where is my time machine to go see these two perform together?

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2 Responses to “Enter a chorus of lepers.”

  1. jean says:

    Do you or any other siblings remember the stuffed animals ( I think they were cows) that had long arms that could velcro together and they could hug? Their names were Abelard and Heloise. Must have been Mum and dad’s doing…

  2. red says:

    Jean – oh my God! I totally remember!

    That is hysterical.

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