When Ellen Terry was onstage, observed Virginia Woolf, “all the other actors were put out, as electric lights are put out.”
This is a blessing and a curse. Star power. Charisma. You either have it or you don’t.
In 1907, great English actress Ellen Terry (who was 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, against beloved English actor Henry Irving, who had just died the past year (and who had worked with Ellen for decades). Ellen Terry, in her 50s now, struggling with her eyesight, and the fact that there were basically no parts written for women of her age in the theatre, was moving into a new phase of her life. It was not easy. For decades, she had worked in Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre, a place that gave her steady work and (for the most part) good roles, not to mention the fact that Henry Irving was her dear friend. Now she felt a bit adrift. Shaw thought she was the best thing since sliced bread – and had been kind of insinuating to her through their correspondence that limiting herself just to Lyceum productions was not good. Henry Irving resisted the modern drama. He stayed away from Wilde, Ibsen, Shaw – and there are parts in all of those playwrights’ plays that Ellen could have soared in. Now 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 also had a hard time remembering her lines, and would sometimes go blank.
Regardless, the show went on. Now this is interesting. Terry stumbled badly in the beginning of the run. Virginia Woolf saw the show one night. 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?
To a fan like Woolf, it might not have mattered, but Terry was crushed. Had she lost her touch? 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 that 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 that the play is NOT the thing – it is what YOU bring to it that is so special. He had a way of relaxing her and also stimulating her that was quite unique in her long career. His words relaxed her. Apparently, she stopped worrying about the lines so much, and didn’t “blank” out if she forgot them. She just improvised along as the character, because she knew the character (there’s that confidence thing again – she remembered what she DID know) – 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, yet again, that 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. This is true of different people and how one thing will work for one, and not work for another, but it is also true of the same person at different points in her life. “Why did this work for me without me even thinking about it when I was 22??” Well, maybe because you were 22, and you are 52 now. But instead of staying stuck in that stuck place (or just resting on her laurels and retiring) – Terry kept at it. In front of an audience. She figured out her way during the run of the play. Obviously she could do that because she was a giant star, but it is still so heartening to me to see her still working, still willing to fail.
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
Virginia Woolf on Ellen Terry:
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.
‘she kept at it in front of the audience..,’ it’s the kind of work I most value seeing – like our night seeing Jeff Buckley at The Green Mill!
Yes – such courage!! To remain “in process” while the show is happening! Ah, Jeff Buckley.
It also reminds me of the great final scene in Opening Night when Rowlands and Cassavetes start improvising and bring the house down. And it’s raw and awkward but hilarious too.
Hey – I was at Jeff Buckley at the Green Mill! Powerful stuff.
Ted – it occurs to me that part of this dynamic for Terry is also why she was pretty much completely baffled by cinema. Terry died in 1928 and only did a couple of silent films and in general did not understand how to work in that medium. She was also in her 60s, 70s, when she “started” in movies – so there’s THAT as well – but that kind of re-working moments in-the-moment, in-process thing that is so organic to theatre just doesn’t fly in cinema.
There are some voice recordings of her, however, doing, I believe, Portia from Merchant of Venice and Ophelia in Hamlet. That was more up her alley.
Kate – Ted and I often reference what we saw that night with Buckley as one of the high points, in terms of performance. Not because he was perfect, he wasn’t – but because he was drunk and tormented and admitted it and couldn’t get to himself, and there was no other way for him to perform. He could not be apart from himself and perform – He literally COULD. NOT. DO. IT. He could not phone it in. It tormented him. And so… moment by moment … he tried to find his way back to himself.
It did NOT go over well with many of the other audience members. Ted and I were riveted and moved.
One of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen. I often think of it when I try to remember why it is I do what I do. What the point of it is. What I strive for.
Ted – and the more I read Woolf’s words on Terry, the more I wish she had written a book on Terry. Or at least on the theatrical geniuses of her day. She seems to have a gift for it.
Ted – I finished the book. Turns out, Ellen Terry’s daughter was Edy Craig (who, of course, I knew about – but I didn’t know the DETAILS). Edy Craig started off as a costume designer, and then went on to be a successful producer – mostly of plays written to further the suffragette cause. She was a lesbian, and lived in a menage a trois for DECADES – two other ladies – one named Christopher St. John (who ended up editing the Shaw-Terry correspondence for publication, as well as editing Terry’s memoirs) and the other named Clare Atwood (known as Tony). They lived in Ellen Terry’s farmhouse together and converted the barn into a theatre – which which I believe still exists. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West were both involved with the theatre, they invested their money in it – and there’s one great story of Vita reading Virginia’s essay on Ellen Terry at the Barn Theatre on a benefit night. Pretty amazing, no?? Edy Craig was a powerhouse. And her brother, Gordon Craig, was obviously a visionary – the classic artist-genius. Terry had a contentious relationship with her children, at times, but they obvously had theatre in their blood.
It sounds like a book I have to put on the list. What you say about the film, interesting point. I think there are some film makers though who learn how to use the moment and keep rolling and others who simply have to plan it all out and all the improv is in the actor’s head (and those filmmakers can be equally good, e.g. Hitchcock), but what must it have been like to have film as a new artform that also used actors but in which so many of the things that were the craft and art of the greats – projection without looking like you were doing it, repeating the performance without looking like you were doing it, performing known texts – no longer served you in the same way!
Ted- that’s one of the reasons why early movies can be soooo fascinating because, if nothing else, you really can SEE what the acting style was like then – which was a carryover from the declamatory gesture-based acting style from the 19th century. Or vaudeville, too – like Mae West’s early movies – they really are time travelers. Very soon, acting-for-film became it’s own THING, with its own concerns – but the early movies were a hybrid – like seeing Lillian Gish’s pantomime-style acting in Birth of a Nation (or any of her great parts) – and while it is a “style” that would soon be out of fashion, it is still SO effective.
From what I gather, Ellen Terry’s talent had to do with her force of personality – as well as her stunning voice and graceful motions. She was said to “float” across the stage – and it turns out that she was very conscious of the “floating” thing, and did something specific with the leading leg to create the effect. Almost like she put her foot down and then bounced it back up again – to give her a lightness of step. I love that this was CONSCIOUS – and also one of the things that everyone who saw her said seemed effortless.
In those early silent films, so much of what filmmakers did was just place the camera as though it was an audience in a proscenium theatre – the innovators, like Griffith, and then Chaplin and Keaton – figured out that no, the camera can MOVE – it can go in close, it can follow someone – it becomes a point of view. It tells the audience where to look – which you can’t really do on a stage, at least not in the same way.
Terry just did not get where the camera was – she was still performing, but her talent seemed made for something HUGE – not small.
I would love to get my hands on the radio recordings she did of some of her great Shakespeare parts.
About the recordings, if you ever go to London there are a BUNCH in the museum portion of the Globe- on the lower level. I mean, the whole museum is fabulous, but this about takes the cake: there are these three booths, and each one has probably 40/50 different recordings of monologues and scenes- ranging in time from Ellen Terry to Anthony Sher. And the way that it’s set up, you can hear 3 or 4 different takes on a Hamlet monologue in a row. It was kind of overwhelming. (Kind of being an understatement!) Seriously, to listen to all of them probably would have taken a couple of hours! Still, it was one of my favorite memories of London. (Ellen Terry’s Portia was, as I remember, just BEAUTIFULLY spoken- diction clear as a bell, and this gorgeous resonant voice almost like an English horn- and very much in a more old-fashioned, declamatory style. I’m pretty sure there was a Henry Irving recording too!)
Oh Lizzie – thank you for this!! I haven’t been there – it sounds incredible!! To hear 3 different versions of Hamlet by all these great actors? WOW!!!
And thank you so much for your description of Terry’s voice – seriously, that is so exciting to hear. I’ve been LIVING with this woman for a week now, just imagining her performances – it’s so cool to hear a description of her voice!!